Today Kaspersky said an implementation of the RC5 and RC6 encryption algorithms found in the data published by Shadow Brokers is identical to RC5 and RC6 code in Equation Group malware.
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“Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic”, he wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Evil” sum of one million bitcoins-at current exchange rates, about $576 million.
TAO, a secretive unit that helped craft the digital weapon known as Stuxnet, has grown in the past decade or so from several hundred to more than 2,000 personnel at the NSA’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.
A mysterious group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers claims to have hacked into the National Security Agency, stolen powerful cyber weapons and surveillance tools, and put them up for auction. Snowden argued that the real point of the hack, which may well have been the work of another group of state-sponsored hackers, wasn’t cryptocurrency profit so much as sending a message.
“NSA is often lurking undetected for years on the”.
In other words, it seems like a Cold War-era enemy is playing a very old game, but this time is playing it in public rather than in the shadows. “You would recognize, “Oops, I uploaded that set” and delete it”. NSA operatives are told to never leave behind any hacking tools they use on servers, “but people get lazy”, Snowden said.
“One of the exploits was targeting a specific Cisco device, and it was only targeting versions that have actually been outdated and replaced with new ones”, Kremez said.
“However, if indeed these techniques were used by the NSA, they will be very anxious that there is now enough information leaked that would allow forensics experts to attribute hacking attacks to the NSA, both disrupting ongoing operations and causing embarrassment”. A separate break-in resulted in a dump of personal information of serving Democrats, all of it from material that had been exfiltrated from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Those moves have caused great consternation among party officials and dread that more is to come.
“Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility”, according to Snowden. Snowden and other experts say that the files leaked so far aren’t operationally devastating for America’s cyberspies – the most recent ones are from mid-2013, after Snowden’s leak of NSA secrets (not code), when the NSA would have locked down and switched servers – but are still a really big deal.
The stolen cyber surveillance tools might help foreign governments do forensics on their own computer systems to determine whether they have been targets of USA surveillance efforts, a potentially embarrassing development for Washington.
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“Accordingly”, he tweeted, “this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks”.
