Hacker Group Leaks 'NSA's Top Secret Arsenal of Digital Weapons' (vice.com) 69
Hacker group 'The Shadow Brokers', which last year allegedly released top-secret tools that the National Security Agency had used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets, today said it is disappointed with President Donald Trump, and released more such alleged tools. From a report on Motherboard: On Saturday, The Shadow Brokers, a hacker or group of hackers that has previously dumped NSA hacking tools, released more alleged exploits. The group published a password for an encrypted cache of files they distributed last year. "Be considering this our form of protest," the group wrote in a rambling, politically loaded rant published on Medium. Back in August, The Shadow Brokers released a number of exploits stolen from the NSA. Many of these affected hardware firewalls, from companies such as Cisco and Juniper. At the time, the group also dumped another cache allegedly containing more hacking tools, and said they would release the corresponding password to the winner of a bitcoin auction. That fund-raising effort was ultimately unsuccessful, and The Shadow Brokers claimed they were calling the whole thing off in January. But now, anyone can unlock the auction data dump. (Motherboard confirmed that the password did indeed decrypt the original auction file). In a series of tweets, Edward Snowden said, "NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons; hackers leaked it. 1) https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP 2) For those who have never heard of the hacker group behind today's leak of NSA's cyberweapons, last year's story."
He adds, "quick review of the ShadowBrokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library, but there's still so much here that NSA should be able to instantly identify where this set came from and how they lost it. If they can't, it's a scandal."
He adds, "quick review of the ShadowBrokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library, but there's still so much here that NSA should be able to instantly identify where this set came from and how they lost it. If they can't, it's a scandal."
Re:Release the Crack-in (Score:1)
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Perhaps this explains Trump et al...
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Should be hanged for treason.
Both sides knew. (Score:2)
The NSA once allowed the Russians to conduct industrial espionage and planted information they wanted Russia to steal. 6 months later one of Russia's main oil pipelines blew up because the PLC and SCADA information they stole actually provided a RAT that the CIA used to sabotage key pumping stations.
Do you sincerly think that this was the sole unique time a US governmental agency tried to feed software with bugs planted in for the purpose to cause mayhem ?
And you are really persuaded that the USSR never ever had the slightest idea that they are receiving bogus software and never had an army of hacker for the sole purpose to review and clean such code ?
(Come on, you're speaking about the USSR - which has secret service at least as good as their western counter part, if not better. Do you *really* think
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True words. +1, would fork.
Not as big as you think (Score:1)
-- TechCrunch [techcrunch.com]
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So basically the Shadow Brokers probably got the hacking equivalent of tools stuffed into a storage closet and forgotten about?
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If you were trying to change the behavior of the government, it wouldn't make sense to release all the most up to date exploits - as soon as you've done it, you've lost all your leverage. At that point it would be "and if you don't do what I want, I'll continue to release the old exploits that you probably don't care about"... not much of a threat.
By releasing older exploits the message is, "see - I can release your tools to the wild... do what I want or I'll start releasing the exploits you really do care
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"Security researchers are still going through the files, but many of the exploits appear to be used for attacking older or little-used system."
-- TechCrunch [techcrunch.com]
Like Solaris and "Linux 2.4"
It makes sense that you would keep a library of tools for hacking older systems and software. There's so much more there to hack.
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Intel ME - mother of all backdoors
Send in Commander Shepard (Score:1)
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There is no 'Deep State' that term was coined by Russian Trolls.
Why is nobody leaking... (Score:2)
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The hacking tools from CIA and NSA have Russian code. They are leaking, just not to the public.
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The Russian's don't want to leak their own code.
Re:Why is nobody leaking... (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to trust consumer grade networks and junk encryption on standard digital devices. The Soviet Union understood codes fail, like in the 1950's.
So the Soviet Union and Russia got smart and moved to more secure methods and went for the human side of spying.
The NSA, CIA and GCHQ just kept on putting more funding into computers and digital collection methods, always just expecting the world to always be more digital.
Everyone has a home computer, every one has a smart phone, every hotel has a smart TV, every company keeps their secrets near the internet. The US and UK also have a culture of contractors and people from the outside helping/giving "orders" to gov/mil staff.
Wage difference, lack of dignity, lack of advancement, no esprit de corp in the West over generations adds to issues only found in the West.
The GCHQ finally fully understood why information leaks, staff walk out and had the methods to keep staff happy in the West by the 1970's.
But the US private sector would have be shut out of gov and mil contracts. So the GCHQ ideas about a better gov workplace got replaced by every more lobbying for more US contractors and private sector support.
In Russia its your rank, your profession, your uniform, your medals, your advancement, your mil, your nation to defend, your honour, a privilege with good educational support.
In the West its a day job, the boss with party political connections, their private sector profit and shareholders, lobbyists and job insecurity. Government workers who dream of private sector wealth, private sector workers who dream of some full time employment.
Moving around the US or UK as a contractor to support the mil/gov with its data collection, computer issues is not a fun profession.
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Probably because the Russians haven't undermined their own security by creating a system of low-bid subcontractors.
the shadow brokers == "alt-right" extremists (Score:1)
If you look at the political ramblings they posted, [medium.com] then you can see what they really are interested in:
- DO support the ideologies and policies of Steve Bannon, Anti-Globalism, Anti-Socialism, Nationalism, Isolationism
- Don’t care if your popular or nice, get er done, Obama’s fail, thinking he could create compromise. No compromise.
Re:No they're Russian State (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely, Guciffer 2.0 has confirmed his contact was a whistleblower in the DNC, namely Seth Rich. This ties in with Craig Murray's assertations that the DNC leaks were an inside job and that he was the recipient for information from an individual in the DNC. Seth Rich's murder still remains unsolved.
Link: http://g-2.space/sr/index.html
This is rather fresh information, so I am not surprised you did not know. Unfortunately, I can only post as AC at this time.
misinformation by the bucketload (Score:1)
why would nsa bother with hacking anything when they can have intel chips contain all of the snooping capabilities they ever need?
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Thats why the "time zone", "ip range" and "language" litter found was always key to showing the origin of any malware.
Getting the data out of some network might not even be the mission.
The code litter is found by the private sector "experts" later is the propaganda win in the tech media.
Better behavior-based detection in AV? (Score:2)
Some sort of "other" secure computer on the final network out, apart from all the infected OS, junk hardware, junk big brand firewalls on random days?
How much is human collected? How much is just kept internally for later network collection after a human infected a system? Human placed? Network placed? Human collected or network collected. Human placed malware and later data is also collected by a human.
Should AV detection consider the idea tha
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Seems *possible* they might, at some point, have leaked warnings to infraguard type people who would patch certain holes quietly... They also released a secure version of linux... centos or ubuntu or something
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They created SELinux and a set of military cryptography standards that differs from the civilian ones, strongly suggesting that the civilian ones are weak. That's all I can think of. They've certainly done a lot to damage the security of the Internet.