Friday, January 13, 2017

Mystery Hackers Blow Up Secret NSA Hacking Tools in ‘Final F--k You’


A gang of elite hackers, believed by many to be Russian, say they’re quitting—just as Donald Trump gets ready to enter the Oval Office.

By Kevin Poulsen 

A mysterious hacking group has been bedeviling the U.S. intelligence community for months, releasing a tranche of secret National Security Agency hacking tools to the public while offering to sell even more for the right price. Now with barely a week to go before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the self-styled “Shadow Brokers” on Thursday announced that they were packing it in.

“So long, farewell peoples. TheShadowBrokers is going dark, making exit,” the group wrote on its darknet site. “Continuing is being much risk and bullshit, not many bitcoins.” The message was accompanied by a parting gift, described by the group as a “final fuck you”: an apparently complete NSA backdoor kit targeting the Windows operating system. The kit is comprised of 61 malicious Windows executables, only one of which was previously known to anti-virus vendors.

The Shadow Brokers emerged in August with the announcement that they’d stolen the hacking tools used by a sophisticated computer intrusion operation known as the Equation Group, and were putting them up for sale to the highest bidder. It was a remarkable claim, because the Equation Group is generally understood to be part of the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program and is virtually never detected, much less penetrated. 

Click here for the full article.

Source: The Daily Beast 

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