No One's Bidding on The Shadow Brokers' Stolen NSA Hacking Tools (vice.com)

That group auctioning the NSA's hacking tools is "very upset" no one's bidding on them. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard: "TheShadowBrokers" authored another bizarre rant expressing their annoyance at the seeming lack of interest in ponying up bitcoins to release their full set of stolen files. "Peoples is having interest in free files ... But people is no interest in #EQGRP_Auction," the mysterious hacker group complained in a ranting post on Medium, which seems to be purposely written in Borat-style broken English. "TheShadowBrokers is thinking this is information communication problem."

The message also blindly lashes out at hackers, foreign intelligence services, and basically anyone else who hasn't bid on the files... At the time of this writing, TheShadowBrokers have only received bids for a total of 1.76 bitcoins -- or about $1,082 -- far below the group's asking price of $1 million.
At least five transactions came from a prankster who was trying to Rickroll the group with bitcoin addresses containing the words "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Comments

In other words

[Dunbal]

FBI upset that no one is going for the honey-pot.

Re:In other words

[Stan92057]

Could be a honey pot but really, what idiot is going to spend 1 million dollars/bitcoins on a criminals/nsa/fbi/cia word lol. It might be all just a file with the sentance, got ya thanks for the coins SUCKA ....lol

Re:In other words

[AHuxley]

Re: "Could be a honey pot"
Yes. Recall the watch on onion routing using XKeyscore.
"How the NSA Targets Tor Users" (July 4, 2014)
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
"... and logs the IP address of people searching for various other privacy and encryption software."
NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails Linux users as "extremists" (July 4, 2014)
http://www.in.techspot.com/new...
"... program marks and tracks the IP addresses of those who search for..."

Good!

[Mister Transistor]

This is great, I hope this happens more often. Maybe these shitbags will stop bothering to mine/phish/malware/etc. for identities and data once they find out they don't have the wealth of Croesus on their hands and no one wants to pay for it.

Re:Good!

[HBI]

nope. Making it an open auction was not the brightest of moves if you wanted a payday...it advertises the shelf life of your information too honestly, and lets people watch who pays. Anyone who might have been tempted to pay a lot for it...isn't going to do it this way.

I suspect we are supposed to think that this is just someone who didn't know how to market it properly. I doubt that. Someone is embarrassing, provoking, or lulling someone into a false sense of security, and had an interest in making it as public as possible. The Borat note seems to support that thesis.

Perhaps

[SeattleLawGuy]

FBI upset that no one is going for the honey-pot.

To be fair, it may be the NSA is upset that nobody is going for the honey-pot.

Surely the auction is either a honey-pot or very closely watched. It would be a bad investment for most people to try buying it under such circumstances, and may even result in criminal prosecution.

Rickroll

[CODiNE]

I'm not familiar with bitcoin address generation. Can someone estimate the amount of computing power required to come up with those wallet addresses? Is this just a quick script that takes a minute at most or something like a hash collusion?