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The NSA Intercepted Microsoft’s Windows Bug Reports
Published on August 05, 2017 at 07:46PM
Bruce Schneier writes on his security blog:
Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports… “When Tailored Access Operations selects a computer somewhere in the world as a target and enters its unique identifiers (an IP address, for example) into the corresponding database, intelligence agents are then automatically notified any time the operating system of that computer crashes and its user receives the prompt to report the problem to Microsoft… this passive access to error messages provides valuable insights into problems with a targeted person’s computer and, thus, information on security holes that might be exploitable for planting malware or spyware on the unwitting victim’s computer…”
The article talks about the (limited) value of this information with regard to specific target computers, but I have another question: how valuable would this database be for finding new zero-day Windows vulnerabilities to exploit?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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