By Big Al
The New York Times reports on “Shaken Security”
A second article brought to our attention by Timothy Howe – If you want to sleep soundly at night don’t read it!
“SHAKEN SECURITY
A SERIAL LEAK OF THE NSA’S CYBERWEAPONS HAS DAMAGED MORALE, SLOWED INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS AND RESULTED IN HACKING ATTACKS ON BUSINESSES AND CIVILIANS WORLDWIDE.
BY SCOTT SHANE, NICOLE PERLROTH AND DAVID E. SANGER New York Times
DUSTIN CHAMBERS NYT
Jake Williams, a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking unit, in Georgia on Friday. The Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that obtained NSA cybertools, identified his work for the agency on Twitter.
DOUG MILLS NYT file
Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on June 7.
WASHINGTON
Jake Williams awoke in April in an Orlando, Florida, hotel where he was leading a training session. Checking Twitter, Williams, a cybersecurity expert, was dismayed to discover that he had been thrust into the middle of one of the worst security debacles ever to befall U.S. intelligence. ¶ Williams had written on his company blog about the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that had somehow obtained many of the hacking tools the United States used to spy on other countries. Now the group had replied in an angry screed on Twitter. ¶ It identified him – correctly – as a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking group, Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, a job he had not publicly disclosed. Then the Shadow Brokers astonished him by dropping technical details that made clear they knew about highly classified hacking operations that he had conducted.
America’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency had been deeply infiltrated.
“They had operational insight that even most of my fellow operators at TAO did not have,” said Williams, now with Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm he founded. “I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. Whoever wrote this either was a well-placed insider or had stolen a lot of operational data.”
The jolt to Williams from the Shadow Brokers’ riposte was part of a much broader earthquake that has shaken the NSA to its core. Current and former agency officials say the Shadow Brokers disclosures, which began in August 2016, have been catastrophic for the NSA, calling into question its ability to protect potent cyberweapons and its very value to national security. The agency regarded as the world’s leader in breaking into adversaries’ computer networks failed to protect its own.
“These leaks have been incredibly damaging to our intelligence and cyber capabilities,” said Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “The fundamental purpose of intelligence is to be able to effectively penetrate our adversaries in order to gather vital intelligence. By its very nature, that only works if secrecy is maintained and our codes are protected.”
With a leak of intelligence methods like the NSA tools, Panetta said, “Every time it happens, you essentially have to start over.”
Fifteen months into a wide-ranging investigation by the agency’s counterintelligence arm, …read more
Source:: The Korelin Economics Report
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