14 DAY TRIAL // The Shadow Brokers, a hacking group, has published the password to a collection of hacking tools used by the NSA. This comes as a form of protest against Donald Trump going back on his campaign promises.
Before releasing all the data into the wild, the hackers had actually put the data up for auction, but nobody bought it, perhaps due to the steep asking price of over $7 million in bitcoin. Now, the group revealed a password that unlocks an encrypted cache of documents in a Medium post.
In that particular Medium post, the group complains about Donald Trump failing to make America great again. They question the President's position on Obamacare, Bannon's removal from the NSC, and the increased involvement of the United States in a foreign war, namely the Syrian situation.
Security researchers and, certainly, hackers too are looking into the contents of the leak. The archive contains roughly 300MB of data, including some firewall exploits and scripts with cryptonyms like BLASTING, BUZZDIRECTION and so on.
Precious data trove
The list includes servers that the NSA allegedly hacked into and perhaps even used to launch malware attacks, a framework called TOAST which is used to clean server logs and clear the NSA's tracks, and a new set of tools used to hack into servers like PITCHIMPAIR.
The password The Shadow Brokers provided unlocks the hacking tools, which is worrisome because now everyone has access to these files, including people that may seek to do harm. WikiLeaks looked into the files and said the dump includes hacking attacks on EU states, Russia, China, Japan, and South East Asia.
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower that is currently in Russia, has confirmed that the leak includes authentic NSA software, although it's not the entire tools library.
"Quick review of the Shadow Brokers 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," Snowden wrote on Twitter.