'Very High Level of Confidence' Russia Used Kaspersky Software For Devastating NSA Leaks (yahoo.com)

bricko shares a report from Yahoo Finance: Three months after U.S. officials asserted that Russian intelligence used popular antivirus company Kaspersky to steal U.S. classified information, there are indications that the alleged espionage is related to a public campaign of highly damaging NSA leaks by a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers. In August 2016, the Shadow Brokers began leaking classified NSA exploit code that amounted to hacking manuals. In October 2017, U.S. officials told major U.S. newspapers that Russian intelligence leveraged software sold by Kaspersky to exfiltrate classified documents from certain computers. (Kaspersky software, like all antivirus software, requires access to everything stored on a computer so that it can scan for malicious software.) And last week the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. investigators "now believe that those manuals [leaked by Shadow Brokers] may have been obtained using Kaspersky to scan computers on which they were stored." Members of the computer security industry agree with that suspicion. "I think there's a very high level of confidence that the Shadow Brokers dump was directly related to Kaspersky ... and it's very much attributable," David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, told Yahoo Finance. "Unfortunately, we can only hear that from the intelligence side about how they got that information to see if it's legitimate."

Comments

Kaspersky did their job

[KiloByte]

If Kaspersky are indeed behind this, they are doing what their company is supposed to do: find malware and make it public. Without their help, NSA's malware would be still in the wild.

Re:Kaspersky did their job

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, in spite of the GOP abandoning him, he won the election. I think this can only be explained by some combination of Clinton being so obnoxious a choice that people couldn't bring themselves to case a ballot for her and Trump being quite crafty in his strategy.

Remember, both candidates knew that the popular vote didn't matter and both campaigned to win the EC.

For example, Trump didn't spend much time in California because there was no possibility he would win it and, if he did win it, it meant he didn't need it as the election would have been a landslide in his favor even without California's EC votes. Similarly, California voters who may have supported Trump had no reason to even bother to vote. In a liberal state like California, putting a Trump sticker on your car in an urban area was like putting a Goldwater sticker on your car in 1964 (I know, I lived there in Berkeley in 1964 and our family cars had Goldwater stickers on them -- those "tolerant liberals" were only tolerant of their own views - it really sucked being a small child and having your car windows spat on). Thus, most potential Trump voters in California didn't look around and see stickers and yard signs that would motivate them to vote.

Clinton, on the other hand did spend a bit of time in California -- mostly to raise money -- and putting a Clinton yard sign up or a Clinton sticker on your car was perfectly acceptable and wouldn't get you abused, so supporters did so. This inevitably garnered more support as sheeple looked around and saw only Clinton campaign signs and stickers and, being herd animals and tribal in nature, jumped on the bandwagon.

Do you want a President who ran their campaign so terribly that she paid for 3M votes that were obviously useless to her instead of buying a few hundred thousand which would have mattered? Her inability to administer her own campaign effectively and efficiently leaves little doubt that she would have been similarly incompetent as administrator of the country.

On the other hand, Trump is a horrible joke -- but fortunately he's doing a good job at his second most important responsibility - appointing Federal Judges that respect the rule of law and think politicians should make policy, not judges. This judicial legacy will long outlast his term as Federal Judges serve for life, His first most important responsibility is defense -- it's not clear how he will do on that as he's not been tested yet and I hope he's not.

Re:Very high level of confidence in TREASON

[DRJlaw]

Funny anyone asking for real evidence gets modded troll immediately. TLA's are here and are "controlling the narrative" - but failing.

Where's the evidence of this?

Amazing

[110010001000]

The amazing part is that someone actually runs a closed source virus suite from a Russian vendor. Insane.

Re:Amazing

[DNS-and-BIND]

Why not? What have we got to fear? The NSA has a much larger chance of harming me than some distant foreign government. In fact I'd say the dirty foreigners' interest in me is about zero, while the NSA has a constant canker of anxiety about us American citizens, otherwise it wouldn't be spying on us illegally. I simply have less to fear from the foreigners and much to fear from the lawless NSA.

So, what steps?

[DCFusor]

Israel claims to have hacked Kaspersky and seen the Russians in there too - they told us and that's how we originally claimed we knew Kaspersky was involved at all. If you trace back this convoluted story, that's the closest thing you can find to something that's almost believable. OK, so some _NSA_ _dude_ breaks all the rules and takes the nasties home - accidental treason if you will - and happens to have a machine full of stolen microsoft code that came with viruses, and Kaspersky AV too. It sees this, and some other nasty looking things, and brings them back to the mother ship to see what's up - all as designed and as in the EULA and so on. All this was told to us by "reputable sources" naming "reputable sources" in the IC and promoted by the MSM. Now their story changes...they seem to be depending on people having a real short attention span.
.

Not only were there the usual viruses associated with stolen code from MS, but also this stuff from NSA which was picked up as it had the signature of a nasty - because it IS. If the Russians got ahold of it because they had already penetrated Kaspersky...then Kaspersky didn't actually do this - they were an unwitting "useful idiot" at most.
But we have to hate them? Want to bet that's because they refused to back down about putting bugs into their code to "not notice" TLA code, when all other AV's agreed to do that?
.

OK Occam's razor - find another reason that makes sense all around. GoodLuckWithThat. I've yet to see reasonable evidence that the shadow brokers are even russian - they might be, but who knows? Attribution is hard. CIA's leaked tools show their tricks for leaving a false trail, for example (and this is yet another reason not to give any of these guys an encryption backdoor they promise to keep safe - they can't even keep their own stuff safe).