Login required to started new threads

Login required to post replies

Thanks NSA! Leaked Spy Tools Increasing Hacking Attacks Worldwide
Quote | Reply
Back in 2015, an array of NSA's most-potent counterintelligence-related hacking tools began leaking from the spy agency, whether from a Russian hack or from several insiders. Known as the Shadow Brokers disclosures, the tools have of course made their way into the wild, typically via the deep (or dark) Web, and are being put to good use by those with bad intent. Hacking attacks against businesses and civilians worldwide are on the rise due, in part, to those leaked tools, in fact.

Your tax dollars at work, folks. Created by a government that seemingly can't get out of its own way these last 15 or so years.

Jake Williams awoke last April in an Orlando, Fla., hotel where he was leading a training session. Checking Twitter, Mr. Williams, a cybersecurity expert, was dismayed to discover that he had been thrust into the middle of one of the worst security debacles ever to befall American intelligence.

Mr. Williams had written on his company blog about the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that had somehow obtained many of the hacking tools the United States used to spy on other countries. Now the group had replied in an angry screed on Twitter. It identified him — correctly — as a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking group, Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., a job he had not publicly disclosed. Then the Shadow Brokers astonished him by dropping technical details that made clear they knew about highly classified hacking operations that he had conducted.

America’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency had been deeply infiltrated.

“They had operational insight that even most of my fellow operators at T.A.O. did not have,” said Mr. Williams, now with Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm he founded. “I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. Whoever wrote this either was a well-placed insider or had stolen a lot of operational data.”

Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. to Its Core - The New York Times

"Politics is just show business for ugly people."
Quote Reply