It’s still unclear if the tools actually belong to the NSA.
Advertisement
Whether code published online by a mysterious group called “Shadow Hackers” is genuine has been the source of much debate in recent days.
If the hack is real, experts believe that a foreign government must have helped the group in order for it to have exploited NSA resources in this way. If electronic data go bye bye where leave Wealthy Elites?
“This idea that a group of unknown hackers are going to take on the NSA seems unlikely as well, There is a long arm and a long memory to the U.S. intelligence community and I don’t think anyone wants to be on the other end of that without good reason”.
At the same time, other spy services, like Russia’s, are doing the same thing to the United States.
The latter attacks every variant of the ASA software from Cisco, but it is a bit of a challenge to get it rolling. Fortinet, Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based security company, also said it was investigating.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reckons Russian Federation is the most likely suspect behind the leak of advanced hacking tools allegedly stolen from an elite NSA hacking unit. And the NSA hackers will peek into the enemy’s Launchpad and scrap pieces of evidence that will eventually lead to the bad guys. “If they didn’t know, this is VERY BAD”.
As of Wednesday, the NSA still had not responded to multiple requests for comment.
The Shadow Brokers group released a 256MB compressed archive containing around 4000 files that mainly appear to be installation scripts, configuration files, and exploits targeting a range of routers and firewall appliances.
Few take the name or the manifesto at face value.
According to NSA documents obtained by Edward Snowden and reviewed by The Intercept, several elements in the released code line up with details in the agency’s own manuals and materials.
In a series of messages, Snowden wondered aloud whether the server the data was stolen from might be linked to a US attempt to influence a foreign election. “And in the context of the recent conflict between the USA and Russian Federation over election interference, safe money is on the former”.
The tools were posted by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers using file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent and DropBox. Suiche cautioned it was just a theory.
Reuters could not contact the Shadow Brokers or verify their assertions. If our auction raises 1,000,000 (million) btc total, then we dump more Equation Group files, same quality, unencrypted, for free, to everyone. The Grugq said the files look legitimate.
Many dismiss the auction as a stunt.
Weaver said bitcoin “is so traceable that a Doctor Evil scheme of laundering $1 million, let alone $500 million, is frankly lunacy”.
Advertisement
It’s more than pocket change. The group demands 1 million bitcoins or approximately 560 million U.S. dollars to release more documents.
