NSA Hack Endangers Companies, Government Agencies

Despite pressure to share the cybersecurity weaknesses they’ve discovered over the years, the National Security Agency kept the information mostly to itself. Now that the agency has been breached and its hacking tools released, the commercial firewall flaws the NSA found have been exposed to the world – and countless large companies and government agencies made vulnerable as a result. Until the software flaws are patched, any basement hacker or foreign spy can manipulate those systems. The release of the cache of system weaknesses “demonstrates the key risk of the U.S. government stockpiling computer vulnerabilities for its own use: Someone else might get a hold of them and use them against us,” Kevin Bankston, director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, told the Washington Post. “This is exactly why it should be U.S. government policy to disclose to software vendors the vulnerabilities it buys or discovers as soon as possible, so we can all better protect our own cybersecurity.