Shadow brokers release password for encrypted set of NSA hacking tools

The hacking group calling itself The Shadowbrokers has released another batch of hacking tools. It concerns the same tools for which the group wanted to see 10,000 bitcoin, but they did not receive it and they are now giving away the dataset.

In a post on Medium, the group announces the release. They state in broken English that the hacking tools are now being revealed because President Trump, who the group himself would have voted for, would no longer keep the promises he made during his election campaign. This is followed by several long paragraphs of criticism and suggestions about his policies. This is striking, because previously the group stated that their political expressions only served to draw attention.

The password has been online since Saturday and security researchers are often still busy mapping out exactly how potent the tools are and what they can be aimed at. According to TechCrunch, it seems to mainly concern older and little-used systems. So far, nothing seems to have been found that would be better than the advanced Stuxnet malware. The Shadowbrokers did claim they would have something like this on their hands.

Whistleblower and ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden say on Twitter, however, that it is far from the entire arsenal of hacking tools that would have been stolen from the NSA. “However, it is more than enough for the NSA to determine in an instant where the data came from and how they lost it,” he adds. A former NSA employee is also facing trial on suspicion of leaking the tools.

In August of 2016, the Shadowbrokers made their first announcement. They posted a small set of hacking tools on GitHub that come from the Equation Group, a group of hackers that Kaspersky says “exceeds in complexity and knowledge anything known so far, and has been in business for 20 years.” The group is said to have ties to the NSA. The Shadowbrokers initially wanted to sell the full set of hacking tools to the highest bidder, but that plan failed. A crowdfunding campaign with bitcoin also did not yield the desired result. That is why the group is now putting the data online as a protest.