Latest in Shadow Brokers
A recent opinion piece in The Hill concerning lack of arrests in the Shadow Brokers and Vault 7 cases argues that this primarily demonstrates the government’s general inability to stop insider leaks. Another piece in the New York Times flagged that there have only been three arrests, presumably Hal Martin, Nghia Huang Pho, and Reality Winner.
There's something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is.
Consider these three data points. One: someone, probably a country's intelligence organization, is dumping massive amounts of cyberattack tools belonging to the NSA onto the Internet. Two: someone else, or maybe the same someone, is doing the same thing to the CIA.
The Shadow Brokers are back. Back in August, the group released a large number of stolen tools purportedly hacked from “the Equation Group,” which is near-unanimously believed to be the NSA. In addition to the released files, Shadow Brokers announced an “auction” for the sale of an addition batch of NSA tools.
One of the stranger dramas in information security may now be over. On Saturday, apparently in protest at President Trump’s missile strike on Syria, the group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers dumped the rest of its cache of stolen NSA hacking tools. The collection of exploits had nominally been up for auction, albeit at an improbably high price in Bitcoin, since last August.