This is not a new story, and I decided not to write about it when this “sale” of pilfered NSA hacking tools was offered last August by a group identified as the Shadow Brokers. But this story has taken an amusing turn, so I have included it in a Tuesday post.
The stolen trove of NSA goodies was originally offered as a winner takes all style bid to the first person willing to pony up 1 million Bitcoins, or $500 million dollars.. The auction was interesting from the standpoint that the losers would also being ponying up their bid amounts, too.
Perhaps this is the reason that there have been virtually no takers. Since announced in August, the bid stands at $1.76 Bitcoins or $1082.
Or maybe there is some doubt about the veracity of the offer and the quality of the tools. It does appear from investigations that the tools may be legit and were sourced from an abandoned staging server of an NSA contractor the Equation Group.
For some additional information about this sale, check out Naked Security and Motherboard.
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About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com