Love the shock.

Take a job as a pentester (or don’t) and you’ll look at your list, nod, and say “Yes. This is normal.”

It’s normal to be broken. That’s why to do pentests on every piece of security infrastructure.

The hypothesis that systems like this ought to be secure is empirically false. I am trying to shake the shock out of you, because your surprise = my surprise before being a pentester. But the job forces you to come to terms with the fact that everyone, everywhere, is broken, always, and this is neither surprising nor (and you’ll hate this part) a big deal.

Bug is fixed. Life goes on. Yes, of course the infrastructure could have been attacked from any time between “forever ago” and that fix. Ask yourself: why is this surprising to me? And carefully examine the assumptions with which you want to say “because it’s their job to make it secure...”

To be clear, I wish the world were different. But I wish we’d take a hard look at reality and the history of vulnerabilities. Stop thinking things are secure just because the label says “secure”. People devote their entire existence to seeking out and exploiting the tiniest imperfections, sometimes for no reason other than because it’s fun to do so. There is zero chance software would end up impenetrable under those conditions.

Hell, even Tarsnap screwed up once, and Colin is pretty much cryptographically-signed Jesus. So if someone as smart and dedicated as him can make these mistakes, what hope have we? Especially when “we” consists of a large number of programmers working together, and all the complexities that entails?

The problem is not with digital signatures. The problem is bad ECC certs used to generate digital signatures. So SMB is not affected. Code signed with one of these bad ECC certs is a concern. But considering that people install stuff that's not signed all the time, the primary issue is probably TLS MITM.