‘FBI finds leaked hacking tools in documents of arrested NSA employee’
The FBI recently found leaked NSA hacking tools in a collection of documents seized in the arrest of NSA operative Harold Martin. It is still unclear how the data came out through Martin.
The New York Times reports, citing anonymous sources, that FBI investigators found “terabytes of information” in his possession when Martin was arrested. Now the investigation service has found the leaked hacking tools, consisting of computer code and accompanying instructions, “in the thousands of pages and various storage media” that Martin had in his possession, according to the paper. Investigators are said to have found more classified documents in a shed and in the suspect’s car. A group calling itself the Shadowbrokers offered the leaked files through an online auction in August. It turned out that the files offered did indeed contain working exploits for Cisco and Fortinet firewalls, among others.
The New York Times further writes that researchers so far do not know how exactly Martin’s files ended up with the Shadowbrokers. There would be no evidence that he was the victim of a hack, which leaves open the possibility that the data was stolen from his home. There is also the possibility that Martin knowingly provided the data to third parties, but the motive for such action is unclear, the newspaper said. When the exploits appeared online, the possibility that they came from an abandoned NSA staging server was taken into account.
Harold Martin was arrested on August 27. He was working for the United States Department of Defense at the time. He previously worked for the NSA as part of the TAO division through the Booz Allen Hamilton company. That’s the same company whistleblower Edward Snowden worked for when he was a contractor for the NSA. The investigators tracked down Martin after the publication of the Shadowbrokers sparked a “panic search” within the NSA, the NYT said. Attention turned to Martin when he “posted something online.” It is not clear what the exact cause was.
The files published so far by the Shadowbrokers, they say, are about two-thirds of what they have in their hands. These files were made available for free by the Shadowbrokers and were to serve as proof that the NSA tools are genuine. The group wants to sell the rest of the files, which they claim are ‘even better’. Recently, the Shadowbrokers announced that they had abandoned an auction and gave the impression that they want to raise the amount of 10,000 bitcoins, converted approximately 5.8 million euros, through crowdfunding.
Screenshot of the leaked Shadowbrokers files