Thread: NSA Website Recovers Recovers From Outage Amid Intrigue

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...-rumors-227088

Hackers offer to release NSA's cyber weapons to public for $600 million in bitcoins; Edward Snowden suspects it's related to Democratic National Convention leak

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 5:32 PM

An anonymous group claims to have hacked and stolen the National Security Agency’s powerful tools, and is auctioning off the cyber weapons.

The NSA’s software is up for bid, and could even be publicly made available, if a deep-pocketed donor chips in up to 1 million bitcoins — almost $600 million — to the hacker group The Shadow Brokers.

The hackers claim to have ripped tools from The Equation Group, which has been linked to the NSA’s hacking efforts.

On Saturday, the Shadow Brokers released sensitive documents from the NSA-linked group as proof of its hack.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden commented on the hack, faulting a lazy staffer for the possible leak.

“We want make sure Wealthy Elite recognizes the danger cyber weapons, this message, our auction, poses to their wealth and control,” the Shadow Brokers wrote in their cryptic message during the leak.

The stolen software is believed to be what the NSA uses to hack others, packaged with instructions on how it works.

Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed the NSA’s secret surveillance program, validated the hack, hypothesizing that the leak could be the result of “lazy” staffers at the agency.

“Knowing this, NSA’s hackers (TAO) are told not to leave their hack tools ('binaries’) on the server after an op. But people get lazy,” Snowden wrote in a tweet on Tuesday morning.

He pointed out that while the NSA’s malware staging servers have been hacked before, this is the first time it’s been so public.

He believes the Shadow Brokers’ cyberattack on the NSA’s group is linked to the Democratic National Convention, afterRussian hackers leaked several emails and voice messages.

The group “Shadow Brokers” released a sample of the hack on Saturday, which researchers say matches up with the
National Security Agency’s software.

Researchers who downloaded the sensitive documents released Saturday say it’s the real deal, with 300 megabytes of code that match up with the NSA’s data, Wired reported.

“It looks very much as if the NSA attacked someone, and that someone managed to source the origin of the attacks, and counter-hacked them,” Claudio Guarnieri, a researcher at the University of Toronto, told the magazine.

Hackers offer to release NSA's cyber weapons to public for $600 million in bitcoins; Edward Snowden suspects it's related to Democratic National Convention leak