In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc
In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks
Havoc
By Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane May 26, 2019
For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a
cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers,
shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and
many other services.
But here is what frustrated city employees and residents
do not know: A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the
attack was developed at taxpayer expense a short drive down the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway at the National Security Agency, according to
security experts briefed on the case.
Since 2017, when the N.S.A. lost control of the tool,
EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and,
more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving
billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has
boomeranged back and is now showing up in the N.S.A.’s own backyard.
It is not just in Baltimore. Security experts say EternalBlue
attacks have reached a high, and cybercriminals are zeroing in on vulnerable
American towns and cities, from Pennsylvania to Texas, paralyzing local
governments and driving up costs.
The N.S.A. connection to the attacks on American cities
has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to
discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April
2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Years
later, the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation still do not know
whether the Shadow Brokers are foreign spies or disgruntled insiders.
EternalBlue exploits a flaw in unpatched Microsoft
software.
Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins
University, called the Shadow Brokers episode “the most destructive and costly
N.S.A. breach in history,” more damaging than the better-known leak in 2013
from Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
“The government has refused to take responsibility, or
even to answer the most basic questions,” Mr. Rid said. “Congressional
oversight appears to be failing. The American people deserve an answer.”
The N.S.A. and F.B.I. declined to comment.
Since that leak, foreign intelligence agencies and rogue
actors have used EternalBlue to spread malware that has paralyzed hospitals,
airports, rail and shipping operators, A.T.M.s and factories that produce critical
vaccines. Now the tool is hitting the United States where it is most
vulnerable, in local governments with aging digital infrastructure and fewer
resources to defend themselves.
Before it leaked, EternalBlue was one of the most useful
exploits in the N.S.A.’s cyberarsenal. According to three former N.S.A.
operators who spoke on the condition of anonymity, analysts spent almost a year
finding a flaw in Microsoft’s software and writing the code to target it.
Initially, they referred to it as EternalBluescreen because it often crashed
computers — a risk that could tip off their targets. But it went on to become a
reliable tool used in countless intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism
missions.
Michael S. Rogers, who led the N.S.A. during the leak,
has said the agency should not be blamed for the trail of damage.
EternalBlue was so valuable, former N.S.A. employees
said, that the agency never seriously considered alerting Microsoft about the
vulnerabilities, and held on to it for more than five years before the breach
forced its hand.
The Baltimore attack, on May 7, was a classic ransomware
assault. City workers’ screens suddenly locked, and a message in flawed English
demanded about $100,000 in Bitcoin to free their files: “We’ve watching you for
days,” said the message, obtained by The Baltimore Sun. “We won’t talk more,
all we know is MONEY! Hurry up!”
Today, Baltimore remains handicapped as city officials
refuse to pay, though workarounds have restored some services. Without
EternalBlue, the damage would not have been so vast, experts said. The tool
exploits a vulnerability in unpatched software that allows hackers to spread
their malware faster and farther than they otherwise could.
North Korea was the first nation to co-opt the tool, for
an attack in 2017 — called WannaCry — that paralyzed the British health care
system, German railroads and some 200,000 organizations around the world. Next
was Russia, which used the weapon in an attack — called NotPetya — that was
aimed at Ukraine but spread across major companies doing business in the country.
The assault cost FedEx more than $400 million and Merck, the pharmaceutical
giant, $670 million.
The damage didn’t stop there. In the past year, the same
Russian hackers who targeted the 2016 American presidential election used
EternalBlue to compromise hotel Wi-Fi networks. Iranian hackers have used it to
spread ransomware and hack airlines in the Middle East, according to
researchers at the security firms Symantec and FireEye.
“It’s incredible that a tool which was used by
intelligence services is now publicly available and so widely used,” said
Vikram Thakur, Symantec’s director of security response.
One month before the Shadow Brokers began dumping the
agency’s tools online in 2017, the N.S.A. — aware of the breach — reached out
to Microsoft and other tech companies to inform them of their software flaws.
Microsoft released a patch, but hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide
remain unprotected.
Hackers seem to have found a sweet spot in Baltimore,
Allentown, Pa., San Antonio and other local, American governments, where public
employees oversee tangled networks that often use out-of-date software. Last
July, the Department of Homeland Security issued a dire warning that state and
local governments were getting hit by particularly destructive malware that
now, security researchers say, has started relying on EternalBlue to spread.
Microsoft, which tracks the use of EternalBlue, would not
name the cities and towns affected, citing customer privacy. But other experts
briefed on the attacks in Baltimore, Allentown and San Antonio confirmed the
hackers used EternalBlue. Security responders said they were seeing EternalBlue
pop up in attacks almost every day.
Amit Serper, head of security research at Cybereason,
said his firm had responded to EternalBlue attacks at three different American
universities, and found vulnerable servers in major cities like Dallas, Los
Angeles and New York.
The costs can be hard for local governments to bear. The
Allentown attack, in February last year, disrupted city services for weeks and
cost about $1 million to remedy — plus another $420,000 a year for new
defenses, said Matthew Leibert, the city’s chief information officer.
He described the package of dangerous computer code that
hit Allentown as “commodity malware,” sold on the dark web and used by
criminals who don’t have specific targets in mind. “There are warehouses of
kids overseas firing off phishing emails,” Mr. Leibert said, like thugs
shooting military-grade weapons at random targets.
The malware that hit San Antonio last September infected
a computer inside Bexar County sheriff’s office and tried to spread across the
network using EternalBlue, according to two people briefed on the attack.
This past week, researchers at the security firm Palo
Alto Networks discovered that a Chinese state group, Emissary Panda, had hacked
into Middle Eastern governments using EternalBlue.
“You can’t hope that once the initial wave of attacks is
over, it will go away,” said Jen Miller-Osborn, a deputy director of threat
intelligence at Palo Alto Networks. “We expect EternalBlue will be used almost
forever, because if attackers find a system that isn’t patched, it is so
useful.”
Until a decade or so ago, the most powerful cyberweapons
belonged almost exclusively to intelligence agencies — N.S.A. officials used
the term “NOBUS,” for “nobody but us,” for vulnerabilities only the agency had
the sophistication to exploit. But that advantage has hugely eroded, not only
because of the leaks, but because anyone can grab a cyberweapon’s code once
it’s used in the wild.
Some F.B.I. and Homeland Security officials, speaking
privately, said more accountability at the N.S.A. was needed. A former F.B.I.
official likened the situation to a government failing to lock up a warehouse
of automatic weapons.
In an interview in March, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who was
director of the N.S.A. during the Shadow Brokers leak, suggested in unusually
candid remarks that the agency should not be blamed for the long trail of
damage.
“If Toyota makes pickup trucks and someone takes a pickup
truck, welds an explosive device onto the front, crashes it through a perimeter
and into a crowd of people, is that Toyota’s responsibility?” he asked. “The
N.S.A. wrote an exploit that was never designed to do what was done.”
At Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., where
thousands of security engineers have found themselves on the front lines of
these attacks, executives reject that analogy.
“I disagree completely,” said Tom Burt, the corporate
vice president of consumer trust, insisting that cyberweapons could not be
compared to pickup trucks. “These exploits are developed and kept secret by
governments for the express purpose of using them as weapons or espionage
tools. They’re inherently dangerous. When someone takes that, they’re not
strapping a bomb to it. It’s already a bomb.”
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, has called for a
“Digital Geneva Convention” to govern cyberspace, including a pledge by
governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than keeping them
secret to exploit for espionage or attacks.
Last year, Microsoft, along with Google and Facebook,
joined 50 countries in signing on to a similar call by French President
Emmanuel Macron — the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace — to end
“malicious cyber activities in peacetime.”
Notably absent from the signatories were the world’s most
aggressive cyberactors: China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia — and the
United States.
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