NSA did exactly what you said and went to MS months before wcry hit, once it was clear what shadowbrokers had, in order to patch the vulnerability that wcry exploited: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-01...

unfortunately, not everyone keeps their systems totally up to date for various reasons.

Because patching requires a quick risk calculation. Should I patch to the bleeding edge and get the latests security but risk a regression bug, or do I wait a bit so I can run a full regression test?

On my machines, sure I like to stay on the latest and greatest. But I'm sure there are plenty of companies that got bitten because some critical software they rely on didn't play well with the latest OS upgrade. Blame game notwithstanding, it comes down to a business disruption risk.

Of course, the right answer is to test the patches as they come out in a non-production environment, and go from there based on results. But I can see where some companies wouldn't have the resources devoted to do that on a frequent basis, which is unfortunate.

And I'm a security guy. If I don't care enough to update every day, what do other people do? (There's not much reason to keep a personal laptop up to date when you're not interesting enough to be targeted and not in the habit of running random internet programs. Or rather, a few months of lag is fine, as long as you're paying attention to what the updates are for.)

I think we just don't like to acknowledge the fact that updates sort of suck, yet we bash people and shame them for not doing them. I mean, we don't have many other tools to force them to update, but surprise surprise when people are just concealing the fact that they don't update at all. Even in corporate settings.

I'd be interested to hear a heavyweight enterprise sysadmin's take on this, but my experience and read is that it's "toss it at the wall and see what sticks".

Which is crazy when MS knows all of the following things: (a) which files the patch changes, (b) how it changes those files, (c) which programs a customer uses, & (d) which MS files get loaded by which customer programs.

In days where we can do ISA-to-ISA conversion on the fly, you'd think it wouldn't be rocket science to be able to say "Warning! This patch may effect operation of commonly used programs X, Y, and Z". Or at least have an admin tool to provide that information.

This is part of what I do. We do a risk assessment -- SMB and Kerberos get patched no matter what, everything else depends on a test cycle and may be deferred for up to 6 mo.

What? With the large monolithic patches that Microsoft has moved to, they have got worse, much worse, recently. It does make it easier to patch everything at once quickly, but if one thing goes wrong, you have to back it off and lose all protections.

But my point was more towards MS programatically alerting customers as to what programs and subsystems patches might effect.

As far as I've seen, they give you a file list, some brief notes on what the patch is for, and assurance that they internally QA'd it.

But I can't see why there's any technical reason that my system can't warn me that an MS library called into frequently by a particular program I use every day is modified in this patch.

Which is something I care about almost as much as "MS QA passed this patch" (side note: thanks so much to all the unloved, unknown internal QA folks out there, keeping things from breaking!).

The LTSB version is designed to essentially stay the same with regards to applications/apis/etc while still proffering up security updates as fast they have them.

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-10/understanding-long-term-s...

Not to mention that also afterwards there were Windows 7 patches that kept one CPU core 100% busy for days!

Windows 7 is the new holdout, and people aren't eager to swallow 10.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/15/pirated-windows-china-ru...

Except when you are "updated" from a full, paid version to a spyware/adware-ridden version.

Seriously: I think Windows 10 is great, technically and usability wise.

But MS need to learn that they can't have it both ways:

Paid xor ads. (I can think of two exception: inside the store app and inside settings for onedrive.)

There is no good reason to excuse Microsoft for maliciously disguising updates as security patches in order to manipulate the non tech-savvy into switching to their new unprecedentedly invasive OS. Especially when, as you said, the UI is worse.

The entire UX of Windows 10 is worse, every time I have to use it for something I get physical anxiety from claustrophobia.

I really don't like that I have to install untrusted 3rd party software on my computer in order to prevent my operating system from automatically ruining my user experience and spying on me.

Then, not having learned their lesson, they pulled similar crap with the Windows 7->Windows 8 transition which pissed people off so badly that they refused to go to Windows 10 and are currently suing Microsoft for attempting to shove it down people's throats.

Insecure old version of Windows are Microsoft's own damn fault.

Moving them out of the kernel is a great engineering decision, infinite backwards compatibility isn't feasible. Sometimes breaking changes are needed.

The idea of non-privileged drivers is neat, but in general is not worthwhile because the driver has to somehow access the hardware, which for significant amount of device/platform combinations leads to access to arbitrary memory locations.

Edit: perfect example are GPU drivers, which are for a long time typically composed of small priviledged kernel driver and all the complex logic in userspace. In many cases the interface between these two components could be abused to get code execution in kernel context (in 2k/xp times there was even RCE in kernel context triggered by displaying properly crafted image in IE)

This means you aren't preventing drivers from having full access. You just need to prevent more unintended side-effects.

Suddenly, people can run that business critical, single, old driver as unsafe while running the other drivers safely.

Alas, some manager at Microsoft decided it was more important to get his numbers up this quarter so he could get his bonus. In so doing, Microsoft orphaned a bunch of people on XP just like they orphaned a bunch of people on VB6.

Microsoft made its own bed; now it has to lie in it.

There are plenty of companies where "most of the time it's not broken" is a big problem. Possibly bigger than the cost of a security issue (I don't know, because this is both hypothetical and I'm an outsider to the issues at play).

To not acknowledge that others would value a different part of the risk curve lacks perspective.

With all due respect, if that's the case you should not be running Windows.

I can't buy an Emerson control system for a small reactor getting reconfigured every other week, and LabView on an un-networked Windows computer is perfectly fine.

I would not use a PC (with any OS) to control a 10 kg reactor though. At least directly. I think it'd be okay to use a PC to coordinate discrete controllers as long as they couldn't change state without a command (i.e. latching valves and the like) and as long as there was a backup safety that didn't have a computer in the loop.

Safeties that do things like shut off furnaces if temperature sensors break or valves that shut off flow if it becomes too high or detect a flame are common, analogous to a fuse on a circuit board. You sure hope not to use them, but they'll suffice for unexpected situations.

But there's definitely a risk that has to be managed, and connecting infrastructure and industrial equipment to the internet is not managing it very well!

All OSes vulnerable to wannacry are still under support.

Contrary to popular belief, wannacry will not spread to windows XP, it will just crash it. It will run on it if you fire the executable manually, but it will not infect an XP host through SMB.

I.e. the average citizen.

Q: Is the NSA there to support the average citizen, or are they there to support the bureaucracy / power structures?

Q: depending on the previous answer, does your security or privacy matter to the NSA?

>Probably they are still breaking US and international laws on that.

Do the people who enforce the law get punished when they break it? On the whole, I don't think that's a clear "Yes". More of a "maybe, sometimes".

In a democracy they do ...

I will grant that there is a strong correlation between (the presence of) rule of law and democracy, but it's debatable in which way a causal relationship might flow or if they might both be caused by something else. (For example, economic prosperity seems to help)

Meanwhile, in a democracy, I can see you could have group not under the rule of law _iff_ any actions they take do not impact anyone who is going by the law, including an impact such as "gives an advantage or benefit to those under the law can't get". Otherwise the government whilst possibly being "by the people" would no longer be "for the people" but instead "for the preferred classes".

You could maybe finagle something that some people could do, that was illegal for others, but doesn't give the first group any benefit. But I don't think you can practically; so practically then democracy would be predicated on rule of law even if not technically required.

I'll grant that in practice it is very difficult to have rule of law without democracy. It is interesting to think about as a "gedankenexperiment" though. :)

Lee Kuan Yew was a benevolent dictator, except for his political opponents. Dictatorship is a spectrum :)

If everybody must follow the same laws, and nobody can change the laws at will, you will get a democracy. If some people can steer lawmaking at will or law does not apply to them, it doesn't matter if you vote on public representatives, they won't be submitted to your wills.

Some may argue a lot of things that may or may not be true.

This will probably always be an issue so long as there are classified operations... Everyone who isn't privy will have their own interpretation of what really happened.

All of the stuff recently leaked by Wikileaks (including today) was from CIA.

People didn't (or couldn't) update their systems with the appropriate patch.

How much money have their tools cost folks in time, money, hardware, and personnel, even in just the last year? How much money have their unpatched exploits cost?

How's that all compare to their (mostly undocumented) annual budget, anyway?