Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver posts a note suggesting a near-legendary agency may be human after all:
And on Twitter, Mikko Hypponen noted an announcement on Github that had gone overlooked for two days, a group is hosting an auction for code from the “Equation Group,” which is more commonly known as the NSA. The auctioneer’s pitch is simple, brutal, and to the point:
How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. 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.
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Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic. And it does not appear to be information taken from compromised targets. Instead, the exploits, binaries with help strings, server configuration scripts, 5 separate versions of one implant framework, and all sort of other features indicate that this is analyst-side code—the kind that probably never leaves the NSA.
And then things get scarier. As I’ve noted in before, computers are multipliers. Spy agencies have always been targets of other spy agencies, but prior to computers, breaking in was hard and then the materials stolen were simply harder to move.
Nowadays, once a compromise occurs, poof! It’s all copied, not removed, and sometimes it takes months to discover what happened.
