After a security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products, along with code to exploit them, the company is now threatening to take legal action and call the cops on them. Microsoft’s veiled threat reignites a long-running argument over what responsibility, if any, security researchers have to disclose vulnerabilities affecting large and wealthy tech giants.
On Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post criticizing the researcher, who goes by the handle “Nightmare Eclipse,” for publicly disclosing a series of bugs, including BlueHammer, RedSun UnDefend, and YellowKey. The flaws affected products such as the Windows built-in antivirus engine Defender, and the disk-encryption tool BitLocker.