Rob Joyce, White House cybersecurity coordinator, told Washington Post, “NSA did not know about the flaw, has not exploited it and certainly the U.S. government would never put a major company like Intel in a position of risk like this to try to hold open a vulnerability.” Current and former U.S. officials also said the NSA did not know about or use Meltdown or Spectre to enable electronic surveillance on targets overseas. But track records are different. The Shadow Brokers have been flogging NSA exploits for months and recent worldwide malware/ransomware attacks are tied to exploits the agency never informed major players like Microsoft about until the code was already out in the open.
— source techdirt.com