PARIS: Up-to-date Microsoft customers are safe from the purported National Security Agency spying tools dumped online, the software company said Saturday, tamping down fears that the digital arsenal was poised to wreak havoc across the internet.
In a blog post, Microsoft Corp. security manager Phillip Misner said that the software giant had already built defenses against nine of the 12 tools disclosed by TheShadowBrokers, a mysterious group that has repeatedly published NSA code. The three others affected old, unsupported products.
“Most of the exploits are already patched,” Misner said.
The post knocked back warnings from some researchers that the digital espionage toolkit took advantage of undisclosed vulnerabilities in code.
But Matthew Hickey, of cybersecurity firm Hacker House, noted that many organizations put patches off, meaning “many servers will still be affected by these flaws.”