[Billthedrill]

Oh, dear. Translated as best I can: a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a system wherein the user "tunnels" through using encryption that is based on a random number generator (in this case), which, if not random or otherwise compromised, allows realtime decryption by a third party who is capturing the packets.

Dang, that isn't much better. Sorry.

[freeandfreezing]

Simple summary -- somebody put a backdoor into the Juniper code so spies could access the supposedly secure data. From the article:

"It's very bizarre. I've never seen anything like that before where gone from something that was working and written in a standard manner to something as strange as this," he said. It's that bug that enabled another attacker to replace the Dual_EC constant - thought to belong to the NSA - with their own constant."The very presence of Dual_EC enabled a third party to simply change a constant and make it so they were able to decrypt VPN traffic," Checkoway said...

This is an example of why the kind of backdoor access our security agencies want is a bad idea. Other people find the back door and pretty soon everybody and his cousin are busy reading other people's private information.