NSA Bank System Tracking Revealed in Shadow Brokers’ Zero-Day List

When the hacker group Shadow Brokers released its latest list of Windows vulnerabilities last week, much of the security community was aghast. The new leaks listed a series of hacking tools aimed at those Windows vulnerabilities along with tools aimed at other services and operating systems, ostensibly stolen from the National Security Agency several months ago.

The leaks appeared to be so serious that some security researchers were calling it a Windows apocalypse. Then on April 14, Microsoft spoiled all that fun by pointing out that the vulnerabilities that everyone was all atwitter over had actually been patched a month earlier. This meant that if you were using a machine that had been patched, your machine shouldn’t be vulnerable any more.

Microsoft’s Phillip Misner, Principal Security Group Manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center explained in his blog what was going on. “Most of the exploits that were disclosed fall into vulnerabilities that are already patched in our supported products,” he said. Misner provided a chart of the exploits and of the updates that fixed them.

It’s worth noting that not only was the information from Shadow Brokers not an apocalypse, some of the vulnerabilities were nearly a decade old. One was fixed before the days of Windows Vista. The most recent fix was sent out in March, 2017, about a month before the revelations.

Originally Shadow Brokers tried to auction the vulnerabilities and the tools that were used to exploit them, but there were no takers. At the time it was clear that many of those tools were already known, but on further examination, it seems that they simply were old.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any risk. While Windows computers that run up to date versions of Windows aren’t at risk for these exploits, there are a lot of machines that are still running Windows XP and are no longer supported by Microsoft, and these machines are vulnerable.

In addition, enterprise implementations of Windows 7 and Windows 10 are frequently not up to date because the IT departments delay deployments of security patches for as long as several months to confirm that any updates don’t break anything. Those machines may be vulnerable and will be highly attractive to cyber-attackers.

This means that enterprise IT departments should identify the updates from Microsoft that contain the fixes in the list and apply them as soon as possible. While it pays to be careful when making changes to mission-critical software, it doesn’t pay when you know those fixes are related to real attacks.

Depending on the nature of the enterprise, there are other threats that go along with the revelations as well. The Shadow Brokers claim that their hacking tools came from the NSA, which uses them to spy on companies outside the U.S.

If your enterprise is one of the many that are based outside the U.S. or have interests in foreign nations, then it might be of interest to the NSA and vulnerability may suddenly have become critical.

While the Windows exploits are getting the most press, there’s actually a potentially more serious part of the Shadow Brokers release that’s not getting a lot of attention. Some of the vulnerabilities seem to show that the NSA, if that’s actually where the hacking tools came from, has penetrated part of the SWIFT network through a bank in the middle east.

SWIFT is a global messaging network based in Belgium used by banks to transfer funds. The ability to penetrate the SWIFT messaging network then gives the NSA the ability to track funds as they move around the financial world. Part of this effort has been known for years as the Terrorist Financial Tracking Network, but the details of how it works have always been shadowy.

While there are agreements between the U.S. intelligence community and the EU to share data from the SWIFT network, the amount of sharing that can take place is limited. By penetrating the network itself, the intelligence agencies can get information that’s very detailed and very current. Unfortunately, doing so also violates the agreements between the U.S. and the EU.

By showing that the NSA may have violated the existing agreements, the implementation of the Privacy Shield agreement between the U.S. and the EU may be at risk. This is a significant problem because companies on both sides of the Atlantic depend on Privacy Shield, which regulates what type of sharing of personal information is allowed, and under what circumstances. Without such an agreement, commerce between them is impaired.

So what all of this boils down to is that the Shadow Brokers revelations are a big problem, but not for the reasons originally thought. Microsoft fixed the vulnerabilities, although exactly how the company learned of these vulnerabilities and the tools to exploit them is unclear. But the other part revelations about the NSA’s penetration of the SWIFT network that most ignored at first could cause the U.S. and the intelligence community a very big problem indeed.

What’s unfortunate is that we may never actually know just how much of a problem it turned out to be and ultimately what was done about it.