Further details were scant, but Juniper made clear the implications were serious: It urged users to download a software update “with the highest priority”. Customers included major banks and nine of the 10 top global telecommunications companies, according to a Juniper investor presentation. But because NIST had validated the algorithm, Juniper went forward with the proposal to satisfy a big customer, they said. The hackers’ tweak involved changing the Q value that the NSA algorithm used – the very same vulnerability that Microsoft researchers had identified years earlier. Because of their central role in telecommunications systems, Juniper products have been a longtime target for intelligence agencies, according to a 2011 document leaked by Snowden.
