A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers claims to have stolen a set of hacking tools from a group dubbed the Equation Group, which researchers believe is an elite unit of the United States intelligence agency.
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Cisco announced that two vulnerabilities found in the data released by the Shadow Brokers can be deployed to break in its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software, which powers up firewalls crafted by the company.
Cisco and Fortinet have issued patches for zero-day exploits affecting their products contained in a dump of intrusion and surveillance tools allegedly used by an NSA-affiliated hacking group. While there’s no hard evidence connecting Russian Federation to the data as of now, on Twitter, Snowden argued that Russian Federation may have released the cache to wave the US government away from officially blaming hacks against the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations on the country. “We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons“.
Kaspersky has released analysis that led it to believe “with a high degree of confidence that the tools from the Shadow Brokers leak are related to the malware from the Equation group”.
The hackers could be advertising that they have the ability to identify actions the NSA took on the compromised server, Snowden suggests – a warning of sorts. They say the tools are likely for use by the NSA to penetrate the network firewalls that many corporations or government agencies use to protect their servers from external attacks.
The group’s name appears to be a reference to a character in the “Mass Effect” video games who sells off information to the highest bidder.
Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based security firm that revealed the Equation Group’s existence in a 2015 report, said that the file circulated online this week are “functionally identical and share rare specific traits” with older source code associated with the group.
To say the U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world is a given fact and non-debatable. Messages sent to an address registered by the Shadow Brokers were also not returned.
“We hack Equation Group”, the hackers reportedly said on the website Github.
The tools materialized as part of an internet electronic auction set up by a group calling itself ‘Shadow Brokers, ‘ which has promised to leak more data to whoever puts in a winning bid.
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‘That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Such access would enable the NSA to plant malware in rivals’ systems and monitor-or even attack-their networks. “Particularly if any of those operations targeted U.S. allies… particularly if any of those operations targeted elections”.
