1. This is actually a big deal. Look on Shodan and see how many systems have the CIFS port open, bannering on Win8 and older.
2. There are other risks: pivoting, RDP, etc.
3. Greenwald's entire point of founding The Intercept was to capitalize on bombastic Snowden leak stories without intermediaries such as The Guardian. It seems like it would be counterproductive for the editors to write something measured or that give NSA any benefit of the doubt. Readers should expect alarmist journalism from The Intercept as much as they should expect anti-conservative viewpoints from the NYT.
I did look on Shodan before I wrote the above, am not seeing "millions" of machines like this hyperbolic article claimed.
But never let fact get in the way of hyperbole and clickbait, it doesn't matter that Windows is secure against this out of the box since XP SP2, it doesn't matter that a simple NAT "firewall" will protect you, all that matters is that some article told you to be afraid and no amount of technical facts is going to get in the way of that.
Too many of these types of articles and threads appearing today completely void of rationality about the scope of this because they don't understand the attack vector and "journalists" like The Intercept are not helping. But naturally outside of a few Netsec discussion boards the fear-party is in full swing, and people will downvote those not fully committed to that narrative.
2. There are other risks: pivoting, RDP, etc.
3. Greenwald's entire point of founding The Intercept was to capitalize on bombastic Snowden leak stories without intermediaries such as The Guardian. It seems like it would be counterproductive for the editors to write something measured or that give NSA any benefit of the doubt. Readers should expect alarmist journalism from The Intercept as much as they should expect anti-conservative viewpoints from the NYT.
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