Defense One | By: Stanislav Shalunov | June 29, 2017:
The NSA, which sees its mission as collecting signals intelligence (by breaking into networks) as well as protecting vital U.S. systems, is partially to blame for Tuesday’s massive global cyber attack that hit utilities across Ukraine and Europe and even effected companies in the United States.
The criminals used Petya, a software kit described as Ransomware-as-a-Service by its creators, self-styled Janus Cybercrime Solutions. It allows anyone to launch their own ransomware attack easily and conveniently. Pricing is highly competitive—Janus Cybercrime charges nothing upfront and instead accepts a cut of the ransom.
Like the WannaCry attack that crippled tens of thousands of systems in May, Petya relies on the DoublePulsar backdoor and an exploit of a bug in the Microsoft Windows Network protocol called EternalBlue—NSA hacking tools, publicly released on April 14, 2017, by The Shadow Brokers, a group who have previously released more than a dozen exploits used internally by the NSA. Their identity and motivations are currently unclear.
The NSA hoards exploits instead of responsibly disclosing them to the company that can fix the bug (and then, after a period of time, to the security research community) and deliberately inserts bugs into critical systems to make them less secure. This policy is madness. American Windows users are just as vulnerable as Ukrainian and British ones.
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