The Shadow Brokers, a hacking group who are believed to be behind a massive dump of National Security Agency cyber-weapons and software, on Tuesday warned that they would start releasing information online every month. They said they were also happy to sell the information. The group’s NSA data dumps were used in the recent WannaCry global cyber-attacks. The group behind WannaCry is still unknown.
The Shadow Brokers, however, put up a blog post on Tuesday, in which they said, “In June, TheShadowBrokers is announcing ‘TheShadowBrokers Data Dump of the Month’ service. TheShadowBrokers is launching new monthly subscription model. Is being like wine of month club. Each month peoples can be paying membership fee, then getting members only data dump each month. What members doing with data after is up to members.” Their garbled language online is their trademark.
They threatened that the data released could be anything, from compromised bank data to that from Chinese, Iranian, North Korean or Russian missile programmes. But The Shadow Brokers added that if the “responsible party” bought all compromised information, they would have no more “financial incentives” to sell the data and would “go dark permanently”. This could imply the NSA can buy back their data. The security agency has not yet commented on the hacks.
The group had first emerged in August 2016, after they announced an (eventually unsuccessful) auction of old cyber-spying tools they had claimed was from the NSA.
WannaCry has hit hundreds of thousands of systems across the world. The major cyber attack had targeted several nations, bringing operations at hospitals, telecommunications firms and other companies to a halt.
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