NSA’s Passive Listening Thanks To Windows Bug

If you’re a Windows user – as the vast majority of desktop owners are – you’ll be entirely familiar with that irritating message that follows a system crash: “The system has recovered from a serious error. A log of this error has been created. Please tell Microsoft about this problem,” followed by the option to send an error report or not send one.

In most cases, people are happy to click “send” without really thinking of the consequences. After all, Microsoft only wants to fix the problem, so surely it won’t hurt.

Well, your good-hearted nature may well come back to bite you, if the latest leaks from Edward Snowden are to be believed. According to new documents obtained by Der Spiegel, the NSA has actually been snooping on these error reports, using them to gain inside knowledge about our computer systems.

Der Spiegel says that Windows crash reports give up all kinds of information about your system, allowing them to know what software is installed on your PC, down to the version numbers and whether the programs or OS have been patched; application and operating system crashes that signal vulnerabilities that could be exploited with malware; and even the devices and peripherals that have been plugged into it.

Crash reports reveal vulnerable data

Why should we care about this? Because this is exactly the kind of information that the NSA or anyone else needs when tailoring a specific attack against your system, or when designing some kind of malware to infect it.

According to Der Spiegel, the crash report spying operation appears to have been carried out by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, an operative unit that specializes in infiltrating computer systems belonging to the US’ enemies. An NSA presentation suggests that TAO does so using the NSA’s powerful XKeyscore spy tool, which is able to filter through unencrypted crash reports as they’re sent to Microsoft.

The presentation adds that crash reports are a great way for the NSA to gain “passive access” to targeted PCs, which means that it can gain access to all of the data on that machine without having to compromise the system with malware or some other tool.