Hackers going by the name Shadow Brokers said on Monday they will auction stolen surveillance tools they say were used by a cyber group linked to the U.S. National Security Agency.
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“The Shadow Brokers” also released a preliminary batch of tools, exploits, and files allegedly used by the NSA to spy on their targets.
By claiming to reveal the inner workings of the NSA, the hack is seen by some as the latest salvo between Russia and the United States, after USA officials accused Russian hackers of breaking into files belonging to the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic groups and officials in an attempt to aid Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
A successful hack of the NSA – if that’s what happened – would mark a major defeat for one of the crown jewels of the USA government’s defense establishment.
Hackers calling themselves Shadow Brokers started an auction for the malware last week.
“How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? We find cyber weapons made by the creators of stuxnet, duqu, and flame”. While the ShadowBrokers claimed the data was related to the Equation group, they did not provide any technical evidence of these claims. We follow Equation Group traffic.
The hacking tools come from a what’s called the “Equation Group”, another hacking group long believed to be an NSA offshoot.
“If this were a Russian actor – and again, this is multiple “ifs” here – we’d have to ask what is causing this escalation”, Schiff said.
Cisco has confirmed two exploits in a cache of “cyber weapons” are legitimate, prompting fears over the security of NSA data.
There’s also an important blackmail component to the Shadow Brokers operation, he said.
“It stinks. Too many things around this announcement don’t make sense”, Baikalov said. This group was unmaskedin early 2015 by Kapersky Labs, a Russian security research firm. The highly unusual encryption scheme in the code released is “highly unlikely” to have been “faked or engineered”, according to Kaspersky.
The “Shadow Brokers” are in the spotlight.
“Let’s start with the attribution: there’s no proof whatsoever that the code is in any way connected to EQ or NSA”. Greenwald and Poitras worked closely with Snowden on stories about the NSA in 2013, and they carried the full Snowden archive with them when they created the Intercept with funding from eBay founder and multibillionaire Pierre Omidyar. “The data appears to be relatively old”, said researcher Claudio Guarnieri. Zero-days are valuable to criminals and spies because they can be used to break into systems undetected.
His conclusion: The leak is a reminder to the United States that things could get ugly quickly.
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“And now the auction”. The group is asking for no less than 1 million bitcoin ($568 million), but no strong participants have joined the bidding process yet. One caveat: By “bidding”, they mean sending bitcoins, and losing bidders don’t get them back.
