Just $130,000?
They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. Isn't it a bug bounty worth paying (even secretly) to avoid the negative PR of another global ransomware attack.
The Shadow Brokers is once again trying to sell yet more stolen NSA cyber-weapons, raising the asking price in the process. And the gang has threatened to out one of the US spy agency's ex-operatives that it claims hacked Chinese targets. In the now-traditional broken English statement, the smug miscreants said they had so …
"Slurp would have to admit Bloat has bugs"
Slurp has already released plenty of Microsoft bugs - and they give Microsoft only 90 days notice under their policies regardless of if its fixed or not which isn't very helpful to the rest of us.
Therefore I was glad to see Slurp got slapped for a few billion by the EU....
"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. Isn't it a bug bounty worth paying (even secretly) to avoid the negative PR of another global ransomware attack."
Why would MS do that ? They want to sell more security products, so surely welcome any security issues with their bloat-everywhere OS ! The Shadows Brokers are doing marketing for MS, here ...
"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. "
More to the point, why wouldn't the NSA release them to Microsoft? It's time for the rest of the world's governments to start giving US ambassadors serious grief each time their infrastructure or businesses are hit. For a start May could make it clear to Trump that his invite is cancelled and a new one will only be made once that's done.
Maybe the buyer was a CIA front? That's one way to keep their exploits from falling into the hands of malware authors. For a while at least, unless you trust Shadowbrokers won't double dip and resell them elsewhere down the road!
Maybe they suspect the CIA was the buyer, and decided to jack up the prices since they can afford more. If I were them, and thought I was selling to the CIA, I'd just keep doubling the prices every month...
"unless you trust Shadowbrokers won't double dip and resell them elsewhere down the road!"
I don't see anything in the shadowbrokers "offer" that says the sale is a one time only deal to the first buyer. I'm sure they are planning on as many sales of the same "goods" as they can.