The hacking group known as ‘The Shadow Brokers’ is pushing a monthly subscription service offering members top secret information including “compromised network data” from the nuclear and ballistic missile programs of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
As a reminder, we have noted in the past, many security experts believe the Equation Group is the National Security Agency, and that the Shadow Brokers may be part of a psychological operations campaign run by Russian intelligence.
Shadow Brokers first emerged last August, offering to auction hacking exploits it said were used by the NSA’s elite hacking team known as Equation Group (officially named Tailored Access Operations). NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and others confirmed the leak was authentic.
In December, Shadow Brokers cancelled its auction and offered to sell the exploits.
In April, the group released passwords to the rest of the hacking exploits in a move described as a protest against President Donald Trump for abandoning his base.
The release included a Windows SMB [Server Message Block] exploit, EternalBlue, which was leveraged in the recent WannaCry global ransomware attack.
In its Tuesday blog post, the group expressed its surprise that governments or tech companies didn’t bid in its past auctions.
It said is has always been about “the shadowbrokers vs theequation group,” and implied the NSA is a cohort of tech companies like Microsoft.
And now, as RT reports, the group’s monthly data dump could also include hacking exploits for web browsers, routers, and operating systems including Windows 10.
“TheShadowBrokers Data Dump of the Month” is a new monthly subscription model, the group said.
Payment will likely be made in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin given the group’s ransom demands in previous cyber attacks.
The group also promised to include compromised financial data from the SWIFT international payment order system, used by banks to transfer trillions of dollars each day, as well as confidential data from several central banks.
In a blog post published Tuesday, titled, ‘Oh Lordy! Comey Wanna Cry Edition’ the group accused the NSA of paying Microsoft to keep vulnerabilities in its software (and did not hold back in its accusations)
If theshadowbrokers is telling the peoples theequationgroup is paying U.S technology companies NOT TO PATCH vulnerabilities until public discovery, is this being Fake News or Conspiracy Theory?
Why Microsoft patching SMB vulnerabilities in secret? Microsoft is being embarrassed because theequationgroup is lying to Microsoft. TheEquationGroup is not telling Microsoft about SMB vulnerabilities, so Microsoft not preparing with quick fix patch. More important theequationgroup not paying Microsoft for holding vulnerability. Microsoft is thinking it knowing all the vulnerabilities theEquationGroup is using and paying for holding patch.
Douche bag, dumbass, libtard, rich prick Head Microsoft Lawyer is running his cock holster because he is having ruff weekend doing real work. Head Microsoft Lawyer being angry because he is missing leisurely weekend playing the skin flute behind the country club.
Real work is not being for executives. Real work is being for dirty foreign H1B workforce, happily working for less than stupid lazy American workers.
Shadow Brokers finished its post saying if a responsible party were to buy “all lost data before it is being sold to the peoples” then the group would have no more financial incentives and would “go dark permanently.”