What Experts are saying about shadow brokers As we all have heard the news that a group calling themselves The Shadow Broker has hacked into NSA (National Security Agency) server and stole a disk full of secrets last summer. This stunt pulled by shadow brokers publicly mocked NSA for their vulnerable security and lack of information gathering skills, despite this, they also distributed some of these sophisticated cyber weapons online for the other hacker to use them as per their will. These tools were designed by an elite developer group known as the “Equation Group” which was linked working with NSA. This was later confirmed by the technical report provided by Kaspersky Lab on their blog which showed evidence of matching code with the shadow …show more content…
It was later deduced that the tools were designed in a fashion to bypass any security or firewall using the same NSA leaked tools named as EternalBlue and EternalLove. When the incident was over, The Shadow Broker spread, threatening messages all over the world that they will provide more of these tools every month, giving access to cybercriminals and other government around the globe The Shadow Broker made their comeback last August, in which they released a bunch of hacking tools and exploits, and a couple of information regarding the vulnerability in widely used softwares. In that release, the group published a set of NSA material, that were, a couple of exploits and tools for networking devices like routers; another collection for Microsoft Windows and server services; list of the analyst who broke into the SWIFT banking network. The group came out from their shadow’s and made a re-appearance with a new catastrophic news regarding the online auction of the NSA exploits and hack tools to the highest bidder and asked the payment to be in the new renowned currency “Bitcoin”. The auction didn’t go well as planned by the group in terms of raising around one million bitcoins (Approx. Four Billion five hundred USD). In January 2017 it was reported that they are selling the tools to different hacking groups …show more content…
I probably guess that was the first question that came into everyone's mind, even in the thoughts of security admin of NSA. I think there was a mole inside their corporation, Which helped the group to bypass the security from inside. The main suspect for this was Hal Martin, who was a contractor for NSA and was arrested around August for hoarding national secrets. But even the shadow brokers were active in their game, while Hal was in custody. It could be possible that the leaker got the information from Hal stash or his workstation was compromised. As per the study and references, I have come to some conclusions that the group “Shadow Broker” is not some bunch of hackers, whereas these are a state-sponsored elite group, as these cyber tools are like cyber-nuclear bomb and the one having these in his possession know that more than half of the agencies around the globe are on the hunt for them. Whereas the publishers are not cybercriminals if they were some cybercriminal they would have started making malicious tools for themselves and turning the exploits into virus, worm and profiting themselves from
Leger, Donna L.. "How FBI brought down cyber-underworld site Silk Road." USA Today. Gannett, 22 Oct. 2013. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. .
"The Triumph of Technique – The Logic of the NSA." LibrarianShipwreck. WordPress.com, 22 June 2013. Web. 08 Feb. 2014.
Now, as to who the breach went to. At first he planned on telling the story to the New York Times, but in the end he decided not to because he found out that the New York Times had a great scoop in “the election year of 2004- that the Bush administration, post 9/11, allowed the NSA to snoop on U.S. citizens without warrants- but had sat on it for a year before publishing.” Snowden said that “this was the turning poin...
Historically, the Anonymous has been engaging in activities that qualifies the group as hacker group as opposed to troll organisation. The group began its operation on December 2010 by attacking the MasterCard for blocking the Wiki Leaks website donations (Coleman 1). In January 2011, the Anonymous group attack the Tunisian government website for using illegal means against protesters. In February...
this time, the U.s. military uncovered that the data Snowden spilled may have created such a
The threats to security from the United States Department of Defense, the national power grid and the Chamber of Commerce are very real and omnipresent. The Defense Department made an admission of the first major cyber attack upon its systems in August 2010. It was revealed that the attack actually took place in 2008 and was accomplished by placing a malicious code into the flash drive of a U.S. military laptop. “The code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital breachhead.” (2) This quote, attributed to then Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III, is just part of the shocking revelations that were disclosed in his speech made on July 14, 2011.
Poison Ivy is the name given to a family of malicious remote administration Trojans first developed in 2005 and still being utilized for cyber attacks today. As a type of remote administration software, once a computer becomes infected the attacker has complete control of the computer. The most recently documented large-scale utilization of the software was during the “Nitro” attacks from July 2011 through September 2011 that targeted both chemical and defense companies for the purpose of industrial espionage (Fisher). The information security firm McAfee stated that five multinational natural gas and oil companies were successfully targeted by the Poison Ivy malware, as well as 29 other companies identified by Symantec (Finkle). These organizations lost proprietary information to the attackers, including confidential bidding plans (for the energy companies) and details on manufacturing processes and formulas (for several chemical companies).
While Manning’s case is one highlighting lax security procedure, the case of Edward Snowden is one of stark contrast. Edward Snowden grew up near the National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). He is a high school dropout who found an alternate identity on the Internet (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). His father was a US Coast Guard Officer and mother worked as a clerk in the federal court, they separated when Snowden was still a toddler (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Snowden started his career as a CIA employee in Switzerland, where he annotated his displeasure with ongoing activities on anonymous chat boards (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Edward Snowden worked as systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton on contract support to the National Security Agency in Hawaii (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Snowden’s duties allowed him to have administrator privileges; which he used to by-pass authentication procedures to gain access above what he needed or received clearance. The National Security Agency is one of the most secure facilities within the Department of Defense, yet Snowden managed to acquire 1.7 million Top
The history of cybercrime goes back to 1971 and the first computer virus called the Creeper which was created by Bob H. Thomas, who was a BBN engineer (Dalakov, Meltzer, and Phillips). BBN which stands for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, is now Raytheon BBN Technologies (“About”, Dalakov). A computer virus is a program that is created to cause damage to a computer or perform other malicious acts (204). The Creeper virus was designed to infect the ARPANET network. The ARPANET, which stands for Advance Research Projects Agency was set up by the U.S. Government as an agency in 1969 to provide a network of computers that would connect various academic and research organizations; it was the predecessor of the Internet (“Internet”, Morley, and Parker).
Since 1993, in mid- to late summer, DefCon, a yearly convention of hackers1 has occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2001, two programmers from Russia – Dmitry Sklyarov and Andy Malyshev – presented their findings of flaws in protection schemes used by the Adobe’s eBook format.2 Dmitry was arrested by the FBI half an hour before boarding a plane back to Moscow, Russia.3
BY DOUG HENWOOD What’s being touted in some circles as the future of money looks hardly more peaceful than its past. Bitcoin, a formerly obscure cybercurrency, is now all over the headlines with reports of bankruptcies, thefts and FBI lockdowns. If our fate is to buy and sell bitcoins, this instability is troubling. But despite the headlines, the triumph of Bitcoin and related cyber-currencies is a lot less likely than recent commentary suggests.
...Schiller, Dane. "Hackers Threaten to Reveal Cartel." Beaumont Enterprise: A.6 ProQuest HHHHCentral. Oct 30 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2011
In the 1970’s a trend started with phone hacking. Phreaks exploit phone systems to make free long distance calls. One famous phreak is John Draper, also known as “Captain Crunch”, made long distance calls for free by blowing a certain tone in a telephone. This tone opened a line on the phone system and he was able to make long distance calls for free. Two names that everyone is familiar with are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; these two gentlemen founded Apple Computer. However, what a lot of people did not know is that they were members of Homebrew Computer Club. While being members of this club they began making “blue boxes”, which are devices used to help phreaks access phone systems. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had handles that they were known by and they were “Berkley Blue” and “Oak Toebark”.
The methods developed for an APT don’t always end with one attack. These techniques are often copied and applied by other perpetrators against other targets, including organizations of all sizes. Eventually, these techniques may be commoditized and turned into malware kits that are readily available to common hackers for a nominal cost (Rivner, 2011).
Hackers have existed since the launch of the internet itself. Hackers, who pride themselves on demolishing data and changing a computer’s structure, use digital armaments to take advantage of the naiveté of the internet. Although hackers use a variety of me...