back to article Shadow Brokers crack open NSA hacking tool cache for world+dog

The self-styled Shadow Brokers group has made a collection of NSA hacking tools and exploits publicly available. The group released a password for their archive, making it available to all and sundry. They (unsuccessfully) attempted to auction off the trove last year. In a (ranty) statement, Shadow Brokers said it was making …

  1. inmypjs Silver badge

    "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

    I have been wondering what planet I am on recently. Assad is a doctor, an educated man some of which came from the UK, he married a British woman. He is not a fool and understands western culture and values. On what planet would he think it even a tiny bit of a good idea to use chemical weapons instead of conventional weapons against ISIS terrorist rebel holdings? Why do it now when he is winning the civil war?

    I main message from this fiasco is to the ISIS terrorists who now know they can kill a few civilians with chemicals and blame Assad and an orange idiot in American will fire $100 million of missiles at their enemy - what a bargain.

    1. Hollerithevo

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      The tragically obvious: 'power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' There are many instances of educated people turning into earthly demons to protect or extend their power.

      And psychopaths can learn culture and values, indeed, can become doctors and still have cold clay where their hearts should be.

      1. inmypjs Silver badge

        Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

        "to protect or extend their power."

        Except using chemical weapons would predictably do exactly the opposite in spades.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      This was too stage managed to be anything more than an ISIS PR exercise. They have done it before and will assuredly do it again if they think they can pull the wool over the eyes of the west.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

        I find this conclusion unlikely.

        Trump appears to have been making efforts to repair the relationship with Russia (if you believe the media) and I can't see him wanting to alienate the Russians by heavily bombing a known Russian ally without justification ...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

          There were very few concerns of alienating the Russians when you give them a several hours heads up in which time significant equipment and personnel can be moved.

          Not to mention there was apparently not enough damage to the airbase to keep it from functioning more than a few hours as planes were using it the next day.

          Just more theater to divert attention from the investigations into his real masters.

    3. inmypjs Silver badge

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      Since posting I notice even the BBC (hardly reluctant to tow political lies) is calling it a "*suspected* chemical attack".

    4. Uffish

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      Who made the sarin, who initially put it in shells/bombs, who stockpiled them, who has used them before (on his own population), who has directed a war that has cost so many lives simply because he couldn't face losing power, who stands to gain from terrorising the population in rebel territories?

      1. Alumoi Silver badge

        Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

        Who made the sarin, who initially put it in shells/bombs, who stockpiled them, who has used them before (on his own population).....

        Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti?

        Oh, wait, we've killed this one.

        1. Potemkine Silver badge

          Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

          Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti?

          Oh, wait, we've killed this one.

          Certainly not for having gazed Iraqi people!

          His fate was sealed because of oil, not because of his blatant violations of human rights.

    5. tiggity Silver badge

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      Ironically, way back in the day, when picking university course, I decided against a career in medicine because I did not feel I was empathic enough (bad decision..).

      Now I am much older and so have had to have far more contact with various doctors than I would like, it's apparent I made a bad choice, as (from my experience only), for many doctors empathy is not a requirement (often "care" seemed purely to meet minimal duty of care requirements) so doctor would not necessarily mean a caring person

    6. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: "Assad is a doctor"

      Mengele was a doctor

      I honestly cannot understand apparently intelligent people appealing to common sense or basic humanity when they talk about brutal regimes and dictators. Remember why there was a Syrian uprising? Wasn't it something to do with torturing teenagers to find the authors of some anti-Regime grafitti? SURELY someone who understood western culture and values wouldn't do that?

      Whatever the motives of the Orange One, and a quick glance at my posts will show I'm not a fan, who really doubts that the USA had good intel on aircraft movements that matched the attack?

      1. inmypjs Silver badge

        Re: "Assad is a doctor"

        "talk about brutal regimes and dictators"

        It is not a question of him being brutal or evil it is a question of him (and presumably his advisers) being idiots choosing to do their regime significant harm.

        "aircraft movements that matched the attack?"

        Of course they were bombing the place they are fighting a war. The question is were the chemicals in the bombs, were the chemicals stockpiled and released by conventional bombs, were the chemicals deliberately released by the rebels. I think the middle option most likely and the last more likely than the first.

        1. Potemkine Silver badge

          Re: "Assad is a doctor"

          were the chemicals stockpiled and released by conventional bombs

          BS. If you bomb sarin ammo you destroy them.

          Also, the way the gas was dispersed shows that military-grade chemical weapons were used.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Assad is a doctor"

        who really doubts that the USA had good intel on aircraft movements that matched the attack?

        I am sure they did but that does not point to the aircraft using chemical weapons. What if one of the bombs hit the ISIS chemical weapons plant and so caused a leak? Or the whole thing was a setup by ISIS - to them life is cheap and killing a few kids to gain a world wide PR coup would be considered well worth it.

        1. John H Woods Silver badge

          Re: "Assad is a doctor"

          "What if one of the bombs hit the ISIS chemical weapons plant and so caused a leak?"

          Sarin + Bomb = Debris + no(t much) Sarin.

          Sarin is about as viscous as water, has a standard pressure boiling point of 158 degrees C and is not a very stable chemical (that P-F bond will break pretty easily). A leak is going to be a big problem, sure, but *nothing* like an effective CW attack: for that you need aerosols, not splashes.

          With chemical and biological weapons its often harder to weaponize the agents than it is to manufacture them. Dirty bombs are the other way round --- it's relatively hard to get the radioactive material, but any old bomb will spread it around and it'll still be radioactive.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "Assad is a doctor"

            My understanding is that because it does degrade rapidly, due to the P-F bond you spoke of, and the fact that the resultant acid byproducts are highly corrosive the munitions are often packed as binary precursors in the munition and the actual sarin is essentially created at the target. As a result one wouldn't store sarin as is due to both the corrosive nature and the problems resulting from leaks.

      3. Dog11

        Re: "Assad is a doctor"

        @who really doubts that the USA had good intel on aircraft movements that matched the attack?

        Oh, nobody has doubts about that. Where the doubt comes in is that we don't know whether the USA lied about it.

    7. Eddy Ito

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      they can kill a few civilians with chemicals and blame Assad and an orange idiot in American will fire $100 million of missiles at their enemy

      I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only way to get change is to vote third party because when it comes to the red team and the blue team there is very little difference. Here's the blue candidate's position given just hours before announcement of the US strike.

      U.S. elections: it's having the choice of mayo or mustard on your turd sandwich.

    8. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      On the planet of unproven allegations.

      The correct response by Trump and Nato would have been to put a small team of boots on the ground, collect irrefutable evidence, dare Assad to try to bomb while it is being done and work based on irrefutable evidence. If the evidence was right, Russia would have had no choice but to back off from protecting him.

      Hard to do? Not really - there are US special forces in Syria already, there are advisors from other countries too. Probably in the neighbouring village - Turkish tanks are like an hour drive from Idlib inside Syrian territory and some of the forces in question are there today.

      So, instead of that what do we get: amateurs collecting unverified soil samples and fragments from something which is unclear what it is. So if that was Assad, we just lost the perfect opportunity to get his head on a plate as he violated the 2013 agreement.

      The important thing here is "if". There has been a multiple number of occasions when rebel fractions have lobbed weapons (including chlorine) at each other in parallel with Assad and Russian bombing runs in order to "combine the pleasant with the useful" - kill a few of the "wrong shade of black" and get the International community to react in horror at how nasty the common enemy is. If Assad did it, then a "scraped bottom of the barrel" selection of Chlorine, Zarin and several other chemicals would have been less likely.

      The sad part is that we will neither know, nor be able to properly bring Assad (if it was him) to justice for this now. All of this because of a trigger happy idiot orange baboon and a totally screwed up first response (suspiciously inadequate in fact).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: and "Russia would have had no choice but to back off from protecting him."

        I'm pretty sure recent history has shown that Putin does pretty much whatever he thinks is to his own advantage, regardless of the cost to any civilians, and is happy to provide his own "experts" to distract or counter - superficially, if necessary - any evidence that may exist. He also does the same for his allies, or at least until they become inconvenient to him.

    9. Potemkine Silver badge

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      Why do it now when he is winning the civil war?

      Several reasons:

      - He wants to show he can do whatever he wants in Syria without consequences for him

      - Terror is a tool widely used by the Syrian regime

      He is not a fool and understands western culture and values.

      Absolutely, he is not a fool but a bloody bastard who knows well that among western culture and values there is plenty room for cowardice and turning a blind eye. WTF, the Assad family regularly massacres its own people for decades and they are still in place.

    10. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: "wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

      On what planet would he think it even a tiny bit of a good idea to use chemical weapons instead of conventional weapons against ISIS terrorist rebel holdings? Why do it now when he is winning the civil war?

      Assad is, primarily, a puppet in the hands of his fathers advisers. It's enirely possible that there is a power-struggle going on in the background and one of the opposing factions ordered the strike.

      Only he and his handlers will know why something was done and none of them are going to be opening up any time soon.

  2. Your alien overlord - fear me

    " If they can't, it's a scandal." - losing the stuff in the first place was a scandal. Not being able to locate where they lost it from is insignificant .

    1. Steve the Cynic

      "Not being able to locate where they lost it from is insignificant ."

      Sort of, maybe, not.

      I think you can make a strong case that there is as strong a failure of internal controls in an inability to identify the source as there is in the loss itself, maybe even stronger. After all, if you can't tell how you lost it, you can't do anything directed at preventing the next loss.

  3. Drew 11

    Ever notice that Donald has very similar interior decorating tastes as various 3rd world dictators?

    A bit of a worry.

  4. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
    Flame

    Files

    How about, El Reg, doing a modicum of research and actually looking at the files, rather than just linking to Twatter postings?

    99% of the listed infected machines were running Solaris. (There were even SCO & HPUX boxes in there!)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    If Shadow Brokers is being ideologically consistent, they are either Russian or Trump Nationalists

    "Shadow Brokers said it was making the 2013 vintage hacking tools available as a protest against President Trump "abandoning" his base by bombing Syria in the wake of a chemical weapons attack on civilians"

    Hmmm. Looks suspiciously like Russians/Iranians to me.

    I guess that some leftist isolationist hacktavist types could do this, but I have a harder time believing that they would implicitly support the idea that Assad should gas his people and be able to get away with it.

    I personally an kind of neutral about the attack. I'm concerned about Trump's about-face on this, whether there is an actual U.S. "plan" in place for Syria, and whether the rebel territory that got gassed is somewhere that a Westerner could visit without getting kidnapped or his/her head lopped off. But on the other side, if Assad is not stopped, then still more refugees will flow out of Syria and will probably end up on Europe's lap once Turkey can no longer deal with them--and that looks to be somewhere in the short to medium term.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reality Check Please

    Why the shock and horror because he used a chemical weapon? So is it OK killing babies by other means (crushing, burning, phosphorous*, bullets, starvation, kinetic shock, explosion etc)? What about all those weddings, mosques etc bombed? The US spread Agent Orange all over Vietnam and uses depleted uranium for ammo. Or is that ancient history now?

    I wish the world would fucking stop being hypocrites. Assad is a fuckwit but its not about him. He is an ally of Putin; the Russians lease Tartus port from Assad. Regime change in Syria would allow the west to effectively cut off Russia from the Mediterranean and that's what this is about. Its why the US et al are willing to train and arm insane islamist fuckwits. The enemy of my enemy etc. Its also why Russia will go to any lengths to keep Assad there. Any serious military threat to Assad will mobilize the Russian military (where though?).

    If you seriously think this is about freedom or anything similar you are an idiot. Proof? Saudi Arabia, a country far less 'free' than Assad's Syria, is a darling of the west. Compare and contrast the medieval bad-guy running Saudi against Assad. Look at pictures of Assad's wife. She would be beaten or imprisoned for her dress sense in Saudi.

    And those 59 cruise missiles were a complete waste of ammunition. The airbase was functional the next day. I think one hanger was destroyed? Probably lucky strike combined with existing weakness. I don't know if the Russian tech ship 'Vasily Tatishchev' is still in the area but it apparently can detect (preparations for?) cruise launches and warn ahead. Its highly likely (and I mean HIGHLY) that the airbase had a useful period of warning of an incoming attack.

    * 'We only use if for illumination, we promise'

  7. Bucky 2

    "abandoning his base"

    His base consists of plutocrats and xenophobes. I don't see how the Syrian action abandons either. Neither one is going to lose any sleep about bombing brown people.

    As far as stopping Assad, well, "Team America: World Police" was supposed to be a joke about overreach. I'd be in favor of assisting the UN or Europe or something. But if Europe doesn't give a shit, we should stay out of it. It's their back yard, not ours.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    City of London Telecom (COLT) is on that target list

    That's not playing nice with the "Special" relationship.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pretty soon

    The great big orange one will press the great big red button....

    ....O.K. / They pressed the button, Jim. / They pressed the button Billy, what button? / The big red one. / You mean THE button?....

  10. Potemkine Silver badge

    How many FSB/SVR tools revealed by Shadow Brokers?

    None AFAIK. No surprise there from a russian proxy.

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