Seriously, Beware the ‘Shadow Brokers’

It’s not every day a trove of National Security Agency-quality hacking tools gets dumped on the open market, free for the taking, but that’s what happened in April. Security researchers say there’s evidence hackers have already used the tools to infect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world, installing a so-called backdoor that opens up the machines to an almost unlimited level of remote control.

So where’s the panic? Compared with major vulnerabilities discovered in the past few years, such as the Heartbleed bug, which exposed weaknesses at companies including Yahoo! Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., “it’s 10 times worse,” says Sean Dillon, a senior analyst at security company RiskSense Inc. who took apart the backdoor tool, called DoublePulsar, to study it. “The industry has cried wolf on naming all these vulnerabilities. This one’s the big one, but now it just gets lost in the noise, like, ‘Oh, it’s this week’s thing.’ ”