In case you haven’t heard (if you follow our Blog or Facebook page you should have) there is some fallout from the NSA hacking tools being leaked.  At least allegedly.   Our  WebRoot customers are covered and our IDMax customers have been updated.  Are you one?  If not contact us and stay protected. The ‘new’ Ransomware has been wreaking havoc, causing outages, effecting Hospitals, telecoms and business in the UK, Russia, Tiawan and elsewhere. Microsoft has put out patches for it’s operating systems as well as offering some patches for it’s older XP and 2003 OS even though it discontinued support for them sometime ago.   Read More: Here on NetworkWorld, Here on ZDNet.com, More here on ZDNet.com including links to the Patches for Older OS (XP/2003)  

As I have said many times undisclosed vulnerabilities make EVERYONE susceptible to exploits. In an attempt to extort money, a group know as Shadow Brokers has acquired a bunch of hacking tools used by the NSA (and others?).  These are a bit dated, but still very effective on Windows 7 to 2012.  When no one would pay the hush money they demanded they decided to just start releasing them to the public.  So now unpatched systems or ones with no current patch available can be fairly easily exploited. In layman terms someone you don’t like could have complete access to your computer.  Install or run any software they wanted including key loggers, monitoring software, viruses or just download or delete your files.  That’s not all either.  Think you’re safe behind your firewall?  There are also exploits for Cisco and VPN technologies. Read more on The Register. Remember to patch your systems or have us do it for you.

It might be time to turn off automatically sending in your error messages or to click don’t send when they popup.  You might trust the NSA, but in the same way the NSA can harvest this information someone that might not have the countries security in mind could too.

The NSA Uses Windows Error Messages To Spy On Targets: Gothamist.

Is’s not just BIG Brother that can read your Encrypted BlackBerry Messages, It’s Big Brother UK too.  And…  Maybe others we don’t know? Read this article on Network world and realize that no communications you have electronically may be private. Report: UK and US spies have cracked BlackBerrys BES encryption – Network World.