SHADOW BROKERS

The mysterious hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers first surfaced in August 2016, claiming to have breached the spy tools of the elite NSA-linked operation known as the Equation Group. The Shadow Brokers offered a sample of alleged stolen NSA data and attempted to auction off a bigger trove, following up with leaks for Halloween and Black Friday in 2016. This April, though, marked the group's most impactful release yet. It included a trove of particularly significant alleged NSA tools, including a Windows exploit known as EternalBlue, which hackers have since used to infect targets in two high-profile ransomware attacks (see below). The identity of the Shadow Brokers is still unknown, but the group's leaks have revived debates about the danger of using bugs in commercial products for intelligence-gathering. Agencies keep these flaws to themselves, instead of notifying the company that makes the software so the vendor can patch the vulnerabilities and protect its customers. If these tools get out, they potentially endanger billions of software users. More information can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers

WANNACRY

The WannaCry ransomware attack was a May 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The attack began on Friday, 12 May 2017, and within a day was reported to have infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries. Parts of the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) were infected, causing it to run some services on an emergency-only basis during the attack, Spain's Telefónica, FedEx and Deutsche Bahn were hit, along with many other countries and companies worldwide. Shortly after the attack began, Marcus Hutchins, a 22-year-old web security researcher from North Devon in England then known as MalwareTech discovered an effective kill switch by registering a domain name he found in the code of the ransomware. This greatly slowed the spread of the infection, effectively halting the initial outbreak on Monday, 15 May 2017, but new versions have since been detected that lack the kill switch. Researchers have also found ways to recover data from infected machines under some circumstances. More information can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack