Others have linked the Equation Group to the NSA’s hacking arm, although such claims are extraordinarily hard to settle with any certainty.
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In its 2015 Equation Group report, Kaspersky said its researchers had uncovered “a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques”.
Risk Based Security is still looking at how severe these exploits might be, and if they’ve previously been patched.
“Faking this information would be monumentally hard; there is just such a sheer volume of meaningful stuff”, computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver of the University of California at Berkeley said in an interview. The source also noted that it would be easier for an insider to burn a CD with information than it would be for a hacker to access their servers.
Either way, whoever is behind the attack wants to send the message, “We hacked the NSA”, said Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “What is clear is that these are highly sophisticated and authentic hacking tools”, said Mr Oren Falkowitz, chief executive of Area 1 Security and a former TAO employee. “If they didn’t know, this is VERY BAD”.
NSA, Juniper Networks, Cisco or Fortinet has refused to comment on Shadow Brokers hacking claims.
An enigmatic hacking organization referred to as “Shadow Brokers” claims to have acquired vital information connected with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and is now demanding 1 million Bitcoins (almost $570 million) in an auction to disclose more sensitive data.
Now Snowden has taken to Twitter to reveal what he believes happened – namely that the state-backed Shadow Brokers accessed a “staging server” belonging to the NSA, where it found the binaries it is now trying to “sell”.
According to these experts, the coding resembled a series of “products” developed inside the NSA’s highly classified “Tailored Access Operations” unit, some of which were described in general terms in documents stolen three years ago by Edward J Snowden, the former NSA contractor now living in Russian Federation. “Accordingly, this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks”. That would be a politically charged development in the context of recent allegations that Russian Federation is trying to tamper with America’s presidential campaign.
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. Suiche cautioned it was just a theory.
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In fact, Snowden and others point out that the bitcoin bidding may not be the real intention of the Shadow Brokers operation. And Hypponen contends the auction may be nothing more than a publicity stunt meant to maintain the Shadow Brokers’ time in the spotlight. The Grugq said the files look legitimate.
