Andy Greenberg reports:
The NSA’S elite teams of hackers have for years made it their mission to silently compromise computer systems around the globe. Now one group of anonymous hackers claims to have executed a counter-hack with none of the same discretion: They’ve brazenly announced the theft of a collection of files they say belonged to an NSA-linked spy group. And they’re auctioning those files off to the highest bidder.
[..]
Despite the group’s unverified, over-the-top claims and comically broken English, researchers who downloaded the sample posted by the group say it does include intriguing data, such as 300 megabytes of code that match up with actual exploits used by the NSA. “It looks very much as if the NSA attacked someone, and that someone managed to source the origin of the attacks, and counter-hacked them,” says Claudio Guarnieri, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who specializes in state-sponsored malware analysis.
Read more on Wired. See also Risk Based Security’s preliminary report.