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Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

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Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#191

Post by spydum »

Why is everybody posting/curious about the language of the blog post and not the contents of the file?

I've looked through some of the contents.. Some look incredibly old, but others target odd things.. lots of cPanel. My only guess is take the low hanging fruit to build "jump box" type systems?

Some odd examples: ElegantEagle/toffeehammer.. focuses on cgiecho for RCE. The thing is, a CVE was just released for this case maybe a month ago?: http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2017-5613/

So if this dump was from 2013, why did the CVE recently pop up? Or is that coincidence?

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#192

Post by throwaway71958 »

willstrafach wrote: post #115
throwaway71958 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

Are you able to elaborate on how this case is related to the DNC hacks? ShadowBrokers was never accused of being the same as Guccifer2, as far as I understand.

I'm not saying he/she was. But do consider that in one case the most cursory circumstantial evidence is enough to convict, but in this case the same level of "evidence" is not enough to exonerate. Double standard, anyone?

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#193

Post by throwaway71958 »

nyolfen wrote: post #176
throwaway71958 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening"…

'freedom caucus' is a proper noun referring to an organization, they wouldn't need to know the meaning in order to use it. also you seem to ignore the possibility of using some machine translation assistance (eg for short phrases or sentences) which could account both for irregularities and correct verb conjugations.

To this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian. And English/Russian language pair is notoriously bad in machine translation systems. We're talking borderline unreadable, in either direction.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#194

Post by int_19h »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #40
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26

It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

I'm also Russian, and I have to concur with this assessment after looking at the text (while noting that I do generally believe that Russian government was actively involved in cyberattacks against US, including, among other things, to affect election results last year). It does sound very much like a native or near-native English speaker trying to fake Russian accent.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#195

Post by jfoutz »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #188
snowwrestler wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually it's probably a false flag to make Russia look bad." - throwaway71958, created 8 days ago 2017 in a nutshell right there.

For a pro-Russian shill I seem to be doing a bad job, seeing how I'm actually Russian and made no attempt to conceal this fact.

Eh, new account, and a throwaway, don't get offended at people not taking you seriously. You could just as easily be a 14 year old in North Dakota.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#196

Post by mladenkovacevic »

tyingq wrote: post #124
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26

It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…

They went even harder at it in an earlier medium post: "TheShadowBrokers is having special trick or treat for Amerikanskis tonight." https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/message-5-trick-or-treat-... I suppose though, that "Amerikanski" might be used outside Russia. Serbia, Bulgaria? Misdirection seems more likely though.

Amerikanski is used in those languages to indicate ownership (eg. This is an American car) so to someone of slavic speaking origin this would be wrong (they would've said Amerikanci to indicate plural). But even aside from that, this honestly sounds so put on. Even the worst english speakers I know from eastern Europe know that you add an "s" to form plural. We all take English from elementary school and nobody would make that mistake, not to mention that it's a mistake even in a slavic language.

A much more common mistake you will find is not knowing when to use "the" or "a".

Edit: unless it is a Russian pretending to be an American who is pretending to be Russian which, who the hell knows, anything is possible.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#197

Post by int_19h »

nyolfen wrote: post #176
throwaway71958 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening"…

'freedom caucus' is a proper noun referring to an organization, they wouldn't need to know the meaning in order to use it. also you seem to ignore the possibility of using some machine translation assistance (eg for short phrases or sentences) which could account both for irregularities and correct verb conjugations.

> To this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian.

It would vary depending on the meaning in English, too.

The kind of caucus that nominates candidates would be "выборный съезд".

Congressional caucus is actually trickier, just because there's usually no close equivalent in other parliamentary systems (including the Russian one). It's like a political faction, but 1) its platform is not all-encompassing, and 2) its membership is not exclusive (i.e. people can, and normally do, belong to several different caucuses). For that, I don't think there's any good word other than loaning the English word directly.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#198

Post by mirimir »

jorblumesea wrote: post #177
mirimir wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have it both ways. If it's so easy to spot, it's easy to emulate. And how can you rely on motives? What you have is evidence, from which you infer motives. When there's so much avowed certainty with such subjective evidence, one must suspect an agenda.

I'm not sure that's fair to say, you can recognize patterns, spot and attempt to emulate something, but that doesn't mean you actually are doing it correctly. Lots of militaries try to emulate the US military but cannot. Operational expertise, tempo and other factors are really difficult to nail down and something that's developed over time and with practice. I think what you're saying is fair, but the only nation st…

Maybe the US, trying to manipulate itself against Russia.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#199

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

redahs wrote: post #122
cyphunk wrote: post #110

A good time to remember the official US Intelligence Community statement and policy/lie on 0days, as given post-heartbleed: When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software – a so-called “Zero day” vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it – it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than t…

Could this problem be fixed by splitting the NSA into two competing agencies, one handling offensive signals intelligence, and one handling cryptography research and disclosures? Intuitively it seems when the same agency performs both roles it creates a conflict of interest and bias against disclosure.

But then your second branch ends up looking(to the government at least) a lot like a research program instead of anything meaningful in terms of intelligence.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#200

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

doktrin wrote: post #62
stonogo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It couldn't be because perl is installed by default on all of the target platforms. Practicality trumps conference talks when there's work to be done, even in the government.

I know it's not the HN norm, but I believe the parent was making a joke

A joke? On my Hacker News?
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