I always wonder if when things like this get found, there's someone in the NSA going "Wow they finally found it, only took them x years"
I would guess they were aware of the problem weather they created it or not. So yes.
While it's smart to assume so, it's also pretty laughable to think that the NSA has an exhaustive list of encryption vulnerabilities.
Why not? They have enough mathematicians and cryptographers on payroll that they can analyse the major protocols and software that is used. If you look at the recent attacks on TLS - especially the downgrade attacks to export grade ciphers they would be stupid to not exploit this for targeted attacks.
That being said I doubt they'll have very good mathematical attacks as a lot of researchers look at this stuff but implementation bugs, side channel attacks and plain bugs are plenty.
most of the world runs openssl or CryptoAPI - why not spend a few man years looking through these implementations?
Well at least if I where them I'd have some programmers to come up with automatic bug finding techniques and fuzz the hell out of existing applications.
They also likely don't care about your encrypted facebook chat but government infrastructure, mobile telecommunication providers and lots of important enterprises are probably pretty often on their "we need to get in list" if you can decrypt captured encrypted traffic - I imagine this would be a huge net win.
We assume actual human beings need to press buttons to detect obvious developer errors. I bet if an encrypted communication with any kind of bad (or even just popular default) parameter goes through anything the NSA oversees it gets instantly attacked and put in a bin somewhere with your new software name on it. The machine probably even picks a random name for the exploit once it found one.
True, but in this case I'm sure they have enough hardware to factor any widely deployed primes used in crypto or semi crypto comms software. After all, that is half of the NSAs job description.