A hacking collective calling itself ‘Shadow Brokers’ claims to have hacked an NSA affiliate and obtained a set of US government spying and surveillance tools – which it is now willing to auction off for at least half a billion dollars in Bitcoin.
Over the weekend the so-called Shadow Brokers collective released “samples” of the files the group said belonged to the Equation Group, which is believed to be a National Security Agency’s (NSA) affiliate.
The Equation Group, a collection of hackers, has previously been accused by the Kaspersky Lab of using techniques and tools very similar to those of the NSA. In 2015 Kaspersky Lab called the group “a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades.”
While the authenticity of the files that were released on August 13 on Github is yet to be confirmed, the Shadow Brokers promised to release the “best files” to the top bidder in a Bitcoin auction. The collective seeks to raise 1,000,000 bitcoins, worth roughly $560 million.
“We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons,” the hacker collective wrote in a post on Tumblr that has since been taken down. “We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions. You write many words. But not all, we are auction the best files.”
Via RT