This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

It's genuinely wild when you stop and think about it. Some of the most commonly used exploits in pen-testing and CTF platforms like Hack The Box, things like EternalBlue which underpins the legendary MS17-010 vulnerability, didn't come from security researchers or tool developers. They originally came from a shadow organization called the Shadow Brokers who in 2016 and 2017 just... dumped the NSA's offensive hacking arsenal onto the internet for anyone to grab. Tools that the US government had spent years and likely hundreds of millions of dollars developing, now sitting on GitHub for any script kiddie or curious hacker to run.

If you want to really understand how insane that situation was and still is, Nicole Perlroth's book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is absolutely essential reading. The book traces the entire history of the zero-day exploit market, from governments secretly hoarding vulnerabilities instead of reporting them, to the Shadow Brokers leak, to the catastrophic real-world consequences like WannaCry and NotPetya which caused billions in damage worldwide using those exact same stolen NSA tools.

The fact that you can fire up Metasploit today and run an exploit that the NSA was using for covert espionage operations is one of the most surreal things about modern cybersecurity. Highly recommend the book if you haven't read it yet.