NSA's hacking tools dumped online by hacker group

Shadow Brokers, a group of hackers, recently published a password to a collection of hacking tools which were being used by the NSA. This move comes as a protest against Donald Trump going back on his campaign promises.

Before releasing all the data into the wild, the hackers actually put the data up for auction, but nobody bought it, maybe because of the steep price of over $7 million in bitcoin. Now according to a Medium post, the group revealed the password that unlocks an encrypted cache of documents.

In that particular Medium post, the group has complained about Donald trump failing to make America great again. They question the President’s position on Obamacare, Bannon’s removal from the NSC and the increased involvement of the United States in a foreign war, namely the Syrian situation.

Various security researchers and hackers are looking into the contents of the leak. The archive contains roughly 300MB of data, including some firewall exploits and scripts with cryptonyms like BLASTING, BUZZDIRECTION and so on.

The list of documents includes servers that the NSA allegedly hacked into and may have also used to launch malware attacks. Also, a framework called TOAST which is used to clean server logs and clear the NSA’s tracks and a new set of tools used to hack into servers like PITCHIMPAIR. The password which the Shadow Brokers provided unlocks the hacking tools, which is a reason to worry because now everyone has access to these files, including people that may seek to do harm. Wikileaks has looked into the files and found the dump includes hacking attacks on EU states, China, Japan, and South East Asia.

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower that is currently in Russia, has confirmed that the leak includes authentic NSA software, even though it is not the entire tools library.

"Quick review of the Shadow Brokers leak of Top Secret NSA tools reveals it's nowhere near the full library, but there's still so much here that NSA should be able to instantly identify where this set came from and how they lost it. If they can't, it's a scandal," Snowden wrote on Twitter.