In 2015 Kaspersky Lab called the group “a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for nearly two decades”.
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After Github moved to censor the released source codes, WikiLeaks announced that it “had already obtained the archive of NSA cyber weapons released earlier today and will release our own pristine copy in due course”.
A hacker or hackers going by the name of “The Shadow Brokers” is claiming to have hacked a group linked to the National Security Agency (NSA) and are offering their tools for sale on the dark web. You find many intrusions.
Computer security experts worldwide now worry that sensitive NSA spying tools are accessible to common criminal hackers. The group was also allegedly involved in creation of the Stuxnet worm that attacked the Iranian nuclear program in 2010.
The latest hack revealed over the weekend has nothing to do with the Democratic Party or George Soros, and instead a mysterious hacker group by the name The Shadow Brokers claims to have hacked the Equation Group – a government cyberattack hacking group associated with the NSA, and released a bunch of the organization’s hacking tools. Shadow Broker said that the Zip file was just a sample of the Equation Group files it had.
Computer security experts noted that the vulnerabilities exploited by these hacking tools are at least three years old and might be stopped if people, corporations and governments keep their software updated.
The reference to Kaspersky relates to a report written by the security firm in 2015 that labeled the Equation Group as the most advanced hacking group they had ever seen and laid out evidence pointing to links to the NSA, including codenames used by the Equation Group that are found in top secret documents released by Edward Snowden. We hack Equation Group.
“If this is a hoax, the perpetrators put a huge amount of effort in”, a security researcher told Motherboard.
The group is offering the tools for auction but has said that if they receive 1 million bitcoin ($568 million) they will release the tools to everyone for free. He also cautioned that this is a preliminary analysis and that more analysis is needed.
“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.
Dmitri Alperovitch, CTO of security firm CrowdStrike in a series of tweets, said that the latest leak will further jeopardize the U.S. elections.
A Kaspersky Lab researcher declined to comment. “This is good proof no?” read an entertaining message posted on Pastebin by Shadow Brokers.
But, at worst, this is one more example that no one is safe from being breached.
“As far as I know, EQ has never been proven to be a USA intelligence agency”, he said.
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A screenshot of files provided by Shadow Brokers.
