The claims-to-offer-cyber-weapons-in-online-auction-4263/”>NSA was hacked by a group that calls itself Shadow Brokers, a report earlier this week revealed, with some of the stolen cyberweapons being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
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The National Security Agency has, duh, not commented on the reported hack.
“This appears to be legitimate, and a framework created to take control of routers and firewalls”, said Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.
The Shadow Brokers made their claims on a Tumblr blog post written in imperfect English.
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.
The gang claims the stolen hacking tools were developed by “the Equation Group” – a spying entity widely thought to be the U.S. National Security Agency and spying departments from four worldwide allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
“Equation Group” is a name used in cybersecurity circles for the National Security Agency.
Shadow Brokers has said that if it gets Bitcoins worth $1 million, it will release the spying tools for free to everyone.
The hackers proved their words by exposing links to examples of the source code of the stolen programs. The main claim from this mystery group is just an idea behind making money.
Hackers calling themselves Shadow Brokers started an auction for the malware last week. The Equation Group is a name given to a team of USA state-sponsored hackers by researchers at Kaspersky Lab which has collected a great deal of information that seems to indicate that the NSA has created an office with extremely talented developers who appear to have unlimited resources.
Equation Group is widely believed to be closely tied to the NSA.
Hacker News also said the Equation Group has been linked to the previous and “infamous Regin and Stuxnet attacks”, allegedly USA governments sponsored hacks, though the link was never absolutely proven. This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove USA responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server.
Security researcher Claudio Guarnieri said the files could be from a hacked NSA server. The groups says it is auctioning off a separate cache with “the best files” to the highest bidder in a Bitcoin auction, though security experts laugh that off as misdirection.
Right now we don’t officially know that the NSA was hacked, if there was any damaging information taken and if Snowden had anything to do with it.
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The gist, according to Snowden, is that the US should stop pointing the finger of blame at Russian Federation for the attacks on the US Democratic Party’s organising group, the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
