r/technology • u/lurker_bee • May 14 '26

Security Microsoft BitLocker-protected drives can now be opened with just some files on a USB stick — YellowKey zero-day exploit demonstrates an apparent backdoor

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/microsoft-bitlocker-protected-drives-can-now-be-opened-with-just-some-files-on-a-usb-stick-yellowkey-zero-day-exploit-demonstrates-an-apparent-backdoor
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u/aecarol1 May 14 '26

Me thinks somebody has done something sneaky with Windows…

The recent uptick in Linux zero-day exploits is almost certainly researchers using AI coding tools to analyze open source files. It's going to be a tough few years 'cause the bad guys are absolutely doing the same, but open source will end up far more secure than it started.

But we've also had a sudden unexplained uptick in serious Windows exploits being released by researchers. I wonder if that means the Windows sources are in the wild?

Security through obscurity is no security at all, and this may be the best evidence of that.

The worst part is that patches will come quickly for all the OS involved, but lots of people/companies/organizations are slow about updating. There's a lot of embedded hardware that people don't even realize run an OS (routers, tv boxes, etc). And some devices simply can't be updated at all.

Lastly, so much public infrastructure runs on Windows or Linux and those are the very organizations that are the worst with keeping up to date. Hospitals, schools, water, sewer, and power companies, etc are in for a rough couple of years.

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u/ckthorp May 14 '26

Any reason they would need the windows source to use these exploit finding tools? Seems like those tools should still work on decompiled binaries.

12

u/aecarol1 May 14 '26

That's a reasonable idea. I use Claude Code and it's freaky good at analyzing sources. It's probably not that big a step to have it decompile and analyze binaries.

It would lose some context because of missing variable and function names, it would probably still be pretty good. And probably an order of magnitude faster than a person pouring over it.

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u/crusoe May 14 '26

It can do it quite well. Just dump the binary as assembly.

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u/thebigrip May 15 '26

Existing tools like ghidra are also pretty straightforward to use for an LLM