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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

#51

Post by kafkaesq »

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'd be curious as to which particular "anti-mistakes" you had in mind (that you believe a non-native speaker wouldn't be likely to make). I have some hunches (like the over-use of linking verbs, and certain overly-idiomatic colocations), but I'd be curious as to what stands out in your view.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

iandanforth wrote: post #3

Can someone remind me why Snowden would be in a position to comment on if this release comprises a full or partial set of hacking tools? Specifically, does this imply that his cache of data included a list of these tools, or was his day to day job one such that he would have been normally in contact with this toolset?

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by ooqr »

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 pretty sure that was GP's point. The text is intentionally garbled with no identifiable first-language bias.

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

#54

Post by kafkaesq »

YooLi wrote: post #28
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…

Why are you so certain they are Russian?

FWIW Snowden speculates "Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility. Here's why that is significant" - https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/765514891813945344

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

#55

Post by DanBC »

snowpanda wrote: post #42
YooLi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so certain they are Russian?

It's the popular thing to assume these days. It's also very insulting to Russian people in my opinion. But I guess it's ok to be prejudice towards some group of people but not others.

Russia uses online trolling as a tool. It's widely documented. This use of trolling leaves Russia open to accusations even when they're not involved.

For a well documented case: http://www.stratcomcoe.org/internet-trolling-hybrid-warfare-...

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

#56

Post by cyberpunk »

NickSharp wrote: post #37
theocean154 wrote: post #15

Looking through some of the code and some of the docs, these look old. In absence of a lot of time or some missing docs, not sure how usable these things are.

For example, this tool says: https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP/blob/master/Linux/doc/user.too... # ELATEDMONKEY is a local privelege escalation exploit against systems running the cPanel Remote Management Web Interface, at least through version 24, and probably future versions too (althogh that should be checked before throwing). It has been tested explicitly on cPanel 11.23.3 and 11.24.4 running CentOS 5.2 Linux -- Thos…

I wish I could say I'm unaware of a few thousand c5 machines still currently running prod and internet facing at just one of my previous clients; but I can't. These releases don't make things much worse than they were for those folks but let's not pretend there isnt a lot of unmaintained compute that this still applies to and that his is likely to change anytime soon.

Don't underestimate the ability of failing smbs to dismiss the risks involved with that when they can't pay to fix it.

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

#57

Post by cyberpunk »

Animats wrote: post #41

This stuff looks old. There are versions for Solaris and SCO Unix.

Solaris is still a valid target. Samsung have several datacentres running workloads on Solaris to the point where it made sense to buy Joyent. Don't you think finance running exadatas are probably worth targeting also?

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

#59

Post by Harken »

"We voted for you, comrade. Here is old malware from deepnet kiddy porn site post for to confuse."

Could be Russia pissed about puppet twitching without permission, or could be Bannon (via Cambridge Analytics?) pissed about puppet twitching without permission.

Twitch, puppet, twitch!

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

#60

Post by doktrin »

kafkaesq wrote: post #54
YooLi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so certain they are Russian?

FWIW Snowden speculates "Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility. Here's why that is significant" - https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/765514891813945344

That 13-point tweet series paints a surprisingly plausible picture. I'm looking forward to getting the full story in about 20 years time.
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