In computer security and cryptography, _NSAKEY was a variable name discovered in Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 belived by many to be a backdoor for the NSA.

In computer security and cryptography, _NSAKEY was a variable name discovered in Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 belived by many to be a backdoor for the NSA. ( en.m.wikipedia.org )

submitted 2014-06-27T00:32 by alllie

4 comments

glugglug 2014-07-02T06:28

The holes in NT4 up until SP4 were big enough the NSA would never have needed their own backdoor. One place I worked the sysadmin had left about 4 months earlier and noone knew the passwords for anything. Didn't matter. We used a tool called "Red Button" which lets you just type the name of the machine you want to administrate and it maps you a share. Worked through NT4 SP3.

That's not even counting the HUGE, incredibly well-known NetBIOS hole which we used to crash Windows 3.1 machines in the early 90s, which wasn't patched until after the MS Blaster worm in 2003.

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Insideblowjob 2014-06-28T12:43

Seriously? Why not just label it "secretNSAbackdoor.exe" that would be less obvious.

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finches 2014-06-27T03:28

Glad I left that trash, I can't believe I was so supportive of MS technologies for so long. If i have to use it, it's in a VM sandbox.

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casualwhoaversereade 2014-06-27T03:10

Not surprising really. Windows has more holes than Swiss cheese. That's why the Chinese and Russian governments stopped using it. I don't trust it to keep my data safe from hackers.... let alone the NSA. I do have a machine running Windows XP but, it's not connected to the Internet. I just use it for old games.

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