In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Havoc
I&#x27;m unclear on why I&#x27;m meant to take this particular Windows SMB exploit so seriously when there&#x27;s such a long history of comparable bugs that nobody ever referred to as &quot;stolen cyber weapons&quot;. I think it might be almost entirely because of the name; &quot;ETERNALBLUE&quot; sounds much scarier than &quot;CVE-2017-0144&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong: a reliable modern Windows drive-by RCE is nothing to sneeze at. But if it wasn&#x27;t this exploit, it&#x27;d be a different one --- <i>will</i> be a different one, likely not &quot;stolen from NSA&quot;, when the next half-life of this bug is reached.<p>The phenomenon of a single bug having intense, distinctive utility is not new. In any couple of years, there will usually be a couple bugs like that --- a very popular RCE that&#x27;s publicly known, and a very popular RCE that is somehow kept on the DL. Back when those RCEs were in things like UW IMAP, nobody wrote NYT stories about how the NSA had accidentally unleashed them on us like some filovirus from Zaire leaked from the CDC.<p>Meanwhile: seized on by North Korea, Russia, and China? Come on. We know roughly how much it costs to develop a reliable remote (Project Zero has written them up, what, a dozen times?). The smallest SIGINT agencies in the world can afford this kind of work out of petty cash. I&#x27;m sure none of them are going to look a gift bug in the mouth. But CVS-2017-0144 isn&#x27;t fundamentally enabling them to do anything they couldn&#x27;t have done themselves.<p>I think Mitre should just start assigning stupid NSA names to CVEs, so that people will take them more seriously.