Speculation continues to run rampant about the extent and scale of the alleged hack that has affected the National Security Agency (NSA).
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“While we cannot surmise the attacker’s identity or motivation nor where or how this pilfered trove came to be, we can state that several hundred tools from the leak share a strong connection with our previous findings from the Equation group”, the company said.
“This message, our auction, poses to their wealth and control”, the hackers wrote.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, did not return requests for comment.
This is a big deal not necessarily because some NSA hacking tools have been stolen, but because they’ve been dumped online for anyone to see.
On one hand, people inside the NSA are likely carrying on with “business as usual”, the source said. “Our rivals do the same thing to us – and occasionally succeed”. The hacker group is demanding bitcoins which cost millions of dollars to release the rest. The hackers also stated that Equation Group did not know what programs were stolen exactly.
The hackers have posted sample files online, and the files contain numerous exploits, implants, and tools for firewall and router products from Cisco, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and Chinese vendor Topsec, according to security researchers. “It’s just ridiculous. That’s not to say they are so ideal, or so impenetrable”.
“The hack of an NSA malware staging server is not unprecedented, but the publication of the take is”, he said.
Risk Based Security is still looking at how severe these exploits might be, and if they’ve previously been patched.
That’s bad news for user security: For one, these tools are now available to criminal hackers.
Snowden also noted the fact that the released files end in 2013.
So what’s next? Security researchers will no doubt continue poking through the files to get an understanding of what is inside, and the companies named will start developing patches that fix their vulnerabilities.
According to Kaspersky, Equation Group dates back to 2001, but could have been active as early as 1996.
However, a potentially more alarming issue is what else might have been stolen. 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.
The announcement from The Shadow Brokers was also published on GitHub and Tumblr, but both entries were quickly deleted. If the Shadow Brokers really did have access to the NSA’s network, they wouldn’t blow their cover with a leak.
The Shadow Brokers made their warning through a Tumbler Blog post written in imperfect English.
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So who are these Shadow Brokers?
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Although the Shadow Brokers are offering no guarantees with their auction, the sale probably isn’t a scam. 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.
