A hacker group known as “Shadow Brokers” plans to auction off files it claims it has stolen from the computer systems of “Equation Group” cyber spies linked with the National Security Agency, Wired reported Monday.
Andy Greenberg writes that Shadow Brokers released an encrypted file that has a decryption key offered for sale in a bitcoin auction, as well as a sample of the stolen data with 300 megabytes worth of code that match NSA-used cyber exploits.
The group posted its claim on the data theft in a now-deleted post to the microblogging site Tumblr, the report said.
Matt Suiche, founder of incident response firm Comae Technologies, has said the released sample files also include previously unpublished exploits that targeted Cisco, Juniper, Fortigate and Topsec equipment.
The report added that Claudio Guarnieri, a researcher at the University of Toronto, also pointed to a match with NSA code included in the 2013 data leak by Edward Snowden.
Wired noted some security researchers think that the leak may be a deceptive operation designed to confuse potential investigators of the hack.
