Shadow Brokers Claim They Have Hacked an NSA Affiliated Hacking Group

Hackers have made claims that today, they hacked a group believed to be an extension of the NSA.

Shadow Brokers, a Black Hat group, are offering proof that they have hacked the group known as the Equation Group. Shadow Brokers claimed earlier that they had free proof that they had breached the groups cyber weapon cache. They also claim that they have even more valuable information than that for sale to the highest bidder.

“We find many, many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. 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,” Shadow Brokers wrote on Tumblr.

Kaspersky Labs drew attention to Equation Group last year by describing them as a group “that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades.” Kaspersky linked Equation Group to the NSA after finding out they were associated with the same cyber-attacks that were linked to the U.S. Government; Stuxnet, and Flame.

One hacker and security researcher believes the information is credible.

“It at all legit, this #EquationGroup leak might be a compromise of a LP. It doesn’t seem to contain source code of actual implants,” Claudio Guarnieri wrote on Twitter.

“This #EquationGroup free dump seems mostly binary builds, installation scripts, and general configuration for a C&C. Seems credible,” another of Guarnieri’s tweets read.

Starting accounts on Twitter, GitHub, and Reddit earlier today to spread the word about their auction. Because the hack is so new, and the sensitivity of the information in question, a lot of people are skeptical to the legitimacy of the claims. If it is legit though, the information might be dated given the fact it references code names first mentioned in the Snowden, NSA leak.

So far, targeted bidders are the wealthy elite, but no one has shown intention on buying. Shadow Box says that if it hits the one million bitcoin mark, it will make the files public. At the current time, they have received under $100.

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