Trump is bringing someone who openly works with Putin's propaganda channel Russia Today to get his first classified intel briefing. Amazing.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) August 16, 2016
Something happening here… I have absolutely no idea how to judge to quality of the latest Alarming Security News, which is why I’m sharing it with you late-night/left-coast tech people. First story I ran across was in Mother Jones:
… The NSA, responsible for intercepting communications around the world, appears to be the latest victim of hacking, at least indirectly, according to multiple news reports. A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released a series of files on Saturday that contained the code behind some powerful hacking tools developed by an NSA-linked group. Those tools have been used to carry out cyberattacks on other governments and private corporations across the world over the last 20 years, according to Forbes.
The Shadow Brokers released a series of files that included installation files and descriptions of networks used for a number of different hacking tools that they claimed to have stolen from the Equation Group—the name security researchers gave to a group of hackers who deployed cyberweapons on behalf of the United States and other Western governments. This group was unmasked in early 2015 by Kapersky Labs, a Russian security research firm. The Equation Group is believed to have been affiliated with the NSA and other Western intelligence agencies, according to security researchers, and is perhaps the most wide-ranging and successful hacking group ever publicly discussed…
Then, in Gizmodo, “Yeah, The NSA Was Probably Hacked”:
… Hacking group “The Shadow Brokers” made headlines Monday when it leaked files that supposedly belonged to “Equation Group,” which has widely been speculated to be an NSA hacking offshoot. When researchers from Kaspersky analyzed Equation Group, they found codenames also found in documents leaked by Snowden. The Shadow Brokers only released some of the files, which computer security experts have deemed as legitimate, and are asking for millions of dollars in bitcoins to release the rest. The files supposedly contain the frameworks for multiple NSA hacking tools.
According to Snowden, some NSA spies may have gotten lazy, and left their hacking tools on the malware staging server…
(Because the wetware is always the most unpredictable risk factor in any security project.)
And now, the NYTimes makes it ‘official’…
… Most outside experts who examined the posts, by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, said they contained what appeared to be genuine samples of the code — though somewhat outdated — used in the production of the N.S.A.’s custom-built malware.