The outage occurred mere hours after a group called the Shadow Brokers leaked what purported to be over 300 “cyberweapons” used by an NSA-linked hacking collective called Equation Group, which is believed to have close links to the NSA’s operations.
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Russian Federation has previously been accused by security experts of hacking into the Democratic National Party (DNC) and leaking confidential internal documents; this may be the latest salvo in an ongoing dispute between the United States and Russian Federation as the USA considers whether to publicly blame Russian Federation for the DNC hack.
“Auction files better than Stuxnet”, the hackers said in posts on Github and Tumblr that were later taken down.
Meanwhile, Fortinet warned in an advisory of a “high”-risk vulnerability in older versions of its FortiGate firewalls, in which a hacker could trivially exploit a cookie parser buffer overflow flaw”.
The hackers are holding a bitcoin auction and say they will give the code to the highest bidder.
The Hacker News reported that, hard as it is to believe that somebody had their way with the NSA’s cyber-spook pros in their own well guarded house, “Some cybersecurity experts who have been examining the leak data, exploits and hacking tools, believe it to be legitimate”.
On Tuesday, Edward Snowden saying as much in a series of tweets, writing “This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove U.S. responsibility for any attacks that originated from [a specific] malware server”, Snowden tweeted”. On Tuesday, security firm Kaspersky Lab found further evidence that Shadow Brokers did indeed steal files from the Equation Group. The plaintext file contains a huge number of files, scripts, and exploits that the group claims to have stolen from a server used by the Equation Group, a team tied to a number of high-level offensive operations that was uncovered a year ago by researchers at Kaspersky Lab. “Anyone capable of finding NSA hackers’ infrastructure, not to mention penetrating it, would likely have to possess government-level resources and talent”. The leaked information is more likely to come from a compromised system outside the NSA’s networks that was hosting NSA malware.
Access to #NSA would be too valuable to spoil in a leak.
It’s still unclear if the tools actually belong to the NSA. But it is too early to say if this code comes from Equation or another group of spies linked to the famous American agency.
It said that elements of a sample released by the hackers for verification displayed characteristics thought to be unique to Equation.
Snowden described in a series of tweets how online espionage and counter-espionage by intelligence services works.
The hacks of emails from the Democratic National Committee led to the resignation of its chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a few other officials.
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“Why did they do it?”
