Spotted: Miscreants use pilfered NSA hacking tools to pwn boxes in nuke, aerospace worlds Miscreants are using a trio of NSA hacking tools, leaked last year by the Shadow Brokers, to infect and spy on computer systems used in aerospace, nuclear energy, and other industries. This is according to Kaspersky Lab, whose researchers today said the American snooping agency's DarkPulsar cyber-weapon – along with a pair of …
All those people who think that they should never have been made public are forgetting that the holes didn't get there by accident.
Further who says that the tools were not employed in these cases by the authors, after all Kaspersky's lips were moving
just like the useful idiots who speak of the spooks setting up the Oz Panopticon. "Why should I worry, I have nothing to hide." Mentioning the poor sods who get extra jail time in Merkin Land merely because an algorithm institutionalises training sets racism does not scare them or PRC Social Capital example has no effect. As for Kapersky, whoever is behind them, at least the IT audience gets to hear about issues. More than the spookeries who developed the tools originally ever did.
This is exactly what was predicted. Even William Gibson predicted state sponsored malware leakage which, make no bones about it, is what this is, long before the Internet became widespread, albeit in fiction. Kuang Grade Mk 11, anyone?
At the risk of a logical fallacy, I suspect this is the tip of a very large iceberg. And they want us to trust them with back-door encryption? Not on your sodding nelly!
Russians, sorry Kaspersky, are good at finding and declaring "Western" state sponsored hacking tools (but are derided in the west)
The NSA, sorry Symantec et al, are good at finding "Eastern" state sponsored hacking tools (and are declared to be bastions of freedom)
Both are good at what they do but is one better or more trustworthy than the other?
I suggest the entire exercise is just playing politics with political masters in order to control the populations for the benefit of the elite (much like the basic aims of any other self-styled religious leaders).
If both sides believed in "freedom", perhaps a more open and formulated approach to producing decent, secure networks and software without holes (deliberate or otherwise) would be a better use of everybody's time?
... the NSA can claim plausible deniability for the listed attacks on Russian, Iranian, and Egyptian nuke and aerospace targets.
(...or that's what I'd think if I was a cynical and suspicious sort of person.)
(...which, of course, I'm not.)
Mike, you are right. If they had been caught Before the leak, it would be clear who it was, now that everyone has them, anyone can use them without concern for getting the blame. But the blame is still there - they created and kept secret these exploits at the expense of national security. Making the NSA a threat to all data on the web. If the NSA had guns and bombs they would be the biggest, best funded terrorist outfit in the world. And they just got handed a blank check for 6 BILLION bucks. All of that will go toward weakening security for everyone. Looking forward to retiring and giving up computers and internet.
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