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.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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