Hackers steal major cyber weapons from USA

Among the digital weapons are “exploits” – hard-to-develop tools used for penetrating and taking over firewalls made by companies, such as Cisco and Fortinet, that are commonly used to protect computer networks. The rogue programs appear to date back to 2013 and have whimsical names like EXTRABACON or POLARSNEEZE.

Funnily enough though, Snowden thinks that his initial document leak may have actually helped in this instance.

The hacking tools come from a what’s called the “Equation Group,” another hacking group long believed to be an NSA offshoot.

But it’s not clear that the NSA at large was hacked. “The Equation Group” is believed to the developer of the hacking tools, exposed in 2015 by Kaspersky, a security firm. Cisco announced on Thursday that it had identified the exploits that allowed the hack and was working on an update. The bug is in the SNMP implementation in Cisco’s appliances and the company said that it does not yet have a patch ready to fix it.

“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.

Former NSA employees have told various media outlets that the code appears to be legitimate as well. “If they didn’t know, this is VERY BAD”.

NSA itself has not commented on this information despite several reminders from the AFP. “We find many Equation Group cyber weapons”. While the rules might state that all servers be cleaned of tools after use, people are lazy he said, which is why these hackers found tools from 2010 through 2013 on the server.

“Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility”, according to Snowden. Several security experts told USA media the code appears genuine, and Snowden said “circumstantial evidence” pointed to Russian involvement. 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.

“This leak looks like somebody sending a message that an escalation in the attribution game could get messy fast”, he concluded.

“The Intercept’s line of reasoning is that the data published onto the web by the Shadow Brokers matches up with never-before-seen classified documents from the Snowden archive”. The hackers are asking for a whopping 1m bitcoins, which is around $580m, to release the best files. So too is the length of the auction, which it said would end, in its signature broken English, “when we feel is time to end”. However, many experts are skeptical of the auction. A bitcoin was worth about 575 dollars Wednesday.

It’s more than pocket change.

They said they will put online more items in exchange for a fundraiser 1 million bitcoins, an electronic money hard to trace.