Last week a malicious computer worm dubbed WannaCry 2.0 began attacking older, unpatched versions of Microsoft operating systems, infecting hundreds of thousands of systems with ransomware that held user data hostage in exchange for Bitcoin payments.
The cyberattack used code from a powerful National Security Agency tool called EternalBlue, which a mysterious group of hackers known as The Shadow Brokers leaked earlier this year. Tech companies have been quick to blame the NSA for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in commercial products like Windows, to say nothing of losing them.
On Sunday, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s (MSFT) president and chief legal officer, argued that an “equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.”
The next day, Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, speaking via video chat to the K(NO)W Identity Conference in Washington D.C. from an undisclosed location in Russia, repeated Smith’s argument.
“An equivalent scenario to what we’re seeing happening today would be conventional weapons, produced and held by the U.S. military, being stolen, such as Tomahawk missiles,” Snowden said while describing Smith’s letter to a crowd less than a mile from the White House.
By Michael Kelley.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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