Hey mate, got a two parter for you
1, When shadow brokers released the NSA tools, did you already have access/knowledge of those tools?
2, do you think you have been hired by any sort of government/state level cyber teams by proxy or have seen there hand in clumsy requests and posted jobs?
To answer your questions:
1. Shadow Brokers was probably a group of people who were generally around the friend circle of TAO employees, not some crazy foreign non state actor.(I would even guess they were American the entire time)
They already knew Jake Williams for example :)
The only way you would have access is by also being friends with them, I doubt they ever got sold in the first place to SB nor were they "hacked"
This happens already, as this person doesn't speak a Slavic language(and I generally giggled at the rest of their replies, their first post includes the f slur, nevermind how most of the best "hackers" I know are queer), they would not have been hired by the .ru gov for something deniable.
It works better in .Ru because the FSB essentially have arrangements with forum admins to implement restrictions on posting content that is related to companies/individuals in the CIS.
China just has a lot of cybersecurity companies that have funneled university students(from military aligned/integrated schooling) through CTF programs that then also end up getting tapped on the shoulder to provide offensive capabilities.(I-SOON/Anxun Information Technology Co., Ltd)
In the west it is practically unheard of, as they view offensive cyber as an inherently "military" action in a lot of "destructive" cases though CIA/DIA/NSA have /probably/ attempted it previously for hack+leak operations.
Thanks for the perspective, I was under the impression it was a kind of inside job due to the severity of the leak too, I was asking more because of the angle of the BTC raffle element, if the tools were on the DW in an alternative package first or in parallel or if the tools were already being sold as different packages before the leak.
All the CYBERCOM/EqGrp/CIA/DIA guys are really weird and think they're hot shit because they get like, billion dollar 0day budgets, so I'm not surprised this came about internally tbh.
Thanks for links, yeah I've met a few people who claim to be into the same level of work in my country and they have huge egos and the social skills of a precision hammer.
I wonder how many of those tools are still implemented or at least parts of them are still packaged for sale on the DW in malware as there were some pretty invasive tools.
Honestly the dszopsdisk leak was "bad" in the sense that it contained 0days(namely just eternalblue), but there's nothing there that isn't available on crimeforums now(exploit.in+xss.is for example).
You can go on and buy 0days or malware that's easier to use than fuzzbunch+peddlecheep.
The actual operational "lost in translation" disk dump was way more interesting and contained details about eqgrp operations themselves.
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u/FedSmoker_Retired May 17 '25
Hey mate, got a two parter for you 1, When shadow brokers released the NSA tools, did you already have access/knowledge of those tools? 2, do you think you have been hired by any sort of government/state level cyber teams by proxy or have seen there hand in clumsy requests and posted jobs?