Thread: A Stolen NSA Tool Is Being Used in a Global Cyberattack

A Stolen NSA Tool Is Being Used in a Global Cyberattack

Amy Zegart
May 12, 2017

The shadow of ousted FBI director James Comey hung over the Senate Intelligence committee’s worldwide threat hearing yesterday. Like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, the presence of Comey’s absence was everywhere. But it wasn’t the most surreal aspect of the day. Here was a hearing on external threats at a moment when internal threats are growing more serious and scary than any time in recent memory. Just 24 hours later, the magnitude of that danger came into sharp focus as cyber attacks using stolen NSA tools hit an estimated 45,000 computers in more than 70 countries, disrupting Britain’s health system and sending officials from Moscow to Madrid back to paper and pens.

Insider threats are not new but the speed and scale of their destructive impact are. In 2001, Robert Philip Hanssen, a 25-year veteran of the FBI, was caught hiding a garbage bag full of classified documents in a “dead drop” under a Virginia park bridge. His arrest ended a 15-year mole hunt for one of the most damaging traitors in American history. Hanssen was found to have passed a few thousand highly classified documents to the Soviets over two decades, including the names of dozens of American agents. Several were killed as a result of his treachery.

Today, trusted insiders can steal and release classified information in terabytes, not trash bags, all in a matter of days, not decades. Chelsea Manning downloaded the contents of more than 250,000 State Department cables on a fake Lady Gaga CD, lip syncing to Lady Gaga's “Telephone” as he exfiltrated the data. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden stole an estimated 1.5 million documents, including information about some of the most highly classified programs in the U.S. government—and not just by copying what he happened to see on his desktop.

A bipartisan review by the House Intelligence Committee found that Snowden deliberately sought access to classified programs by tricking coworkers into giving him their security credentials and by searching their network drives without their permission, downloading away. The “vast majority of the documents he stole,” the report concludes, “have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests—they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.” Snowden’s operation took just 10 months before he high-tailed it to Hong Kong.

And for all the efforts to glue shut thumb drives and call for better procedures to detect when trusted officials become untrustworthy, the breaches just keep coming. In the past year, press reports have made public another wave of breaches believed to have been perpetrated by insiders at both the NSA and CIA that stole and released some of nation’s most sophisticated cyber hacking tools, including the WannaCry ransomware used today. In February, a second former NSA contractor, Hal Martin, was indicted for stealing classified documents. How many exactly? The Justice Department believes it could be as much as 50 terabytes—that’s the equivalent of 500 million pages.

At yesterday's hearing, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats delivered a 28-page threat assessment about the dangers confronting the United States. Two lines look awfully ominous today: “Trusted insiders who disclose sensitive or classified US Government information without authorization will remain a significant threat in 2017 and beyond. The sophistication and availability of information technology that increases the scope and impact of unauthorized disclosures exacerbate this threat.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...attack/526644/

So let me get this straight. The US "intel community" spy tool was used to cause these massive cyber attacks on hospitals, agencies, businesses around the world? This would be the same "intel community" in the US spying on our political candidates? This would be the same "intel community" perhaps "spying" on the DNC? Would this explain how the FBI working with NSA knew the DNC had been hacked before the DNC knew it had been hacked?

Someone needs to ask the FBI how it knew the DNC had been hacked before the DNC knew it had been hacked. I think we have two things going on here at the DNC. I think Seth Rich is responsible for the John Podesta emails that were released to Wikileaks. He was murdered soon after. I think the FBI and the NSA were responsible for the "hack" of the DNC. Downloading emails and releasing them to Wikileaks is a completely different act than "hacking". When you "hack" you get it all and release it all. This didn't happen. What happened was specific emails of one person were retrieved and released to Wikileaks and best I can tell, only John Podesta's emails were retrieved, isn't that right? I'm sure there is far more useful and damaging information than those emails that would have been available through a "hack" of the DNC.

So I think we have two completely separate things going on at the DNC last summer. Just a thought. And frankly, none of it looks like something big enough for the Russians to bother with. All the Podesta emails did was show that some people in the DNC didn't really like Hillary and revealed that she was a phony and a globalist. That wouldn't really cost her Democrat votes, and it didn't cost her those votes. Remember, she won the popular vote according to the election results. Trump outworked and out-messaged her in key states, that's why he won the electoral college and she lost. Trump might have won the legal popular vote if there was noncitizen illegal voting, many of us are certain there was especially in New York and California, but we won't know that or to what degree with any certainty for a long time or whether it was enough to change the state win and convert it to Trump electoral college wins, which as it turned out, he didn't need anyway.

I think the whole purpose of the Wikileaks was to help Bernie Sanders at the Convention, not Trump in the General Election. I think Seth Rich released the John Podesta emails to show how the DNC was conspiring against Bernie and didn't have anything to do with Trump and wasn't a "hack", he just downloaded them figuring out Podesta's code.

The FBI apparently spies on political campaigns and was doing so. They got in to the DNC but couldn't get into the RNC. That's how they knew the DNC had been hacked because they were the ones hacking it, that's why they sent someone over to the DNC to ask them if they'd been hacked before the DNC even knew they'd been hacked. That's why the "intel" community blamed the "hack" which had nothing to do with the Seth Rich leaks to Wikileaks, on Russia, and all came about after the election, rather than when it happened months earlier.

The FBI is exploiting the Seth Rich download of John Podesta emails to explain an FBI "intel community" hack on the DNC as a "Russian" hack to conceal the fact that it was a hack by the US government "intel" community. They then exploit the "Russian" hack to try to bring down this Presidency based on the fabricated tale of "TRUMP TIES TO RUSSIA" because Trump won and wants better relations with Russia, which our "intel community" abhors because without Russia as an enemy, there would be less justification for spying on Americans through its unique surveillance programs.

In my opinion, NSA should be shut down, because to me, their activities defy what most of US consider a proper relationship between American citizens and the US government.