Sandworm by Andy Greenberg;

Author:Andy Greenberg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

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By the end of 2017, theories of how the Shadow Brokers had pulled off their shocking theft of NSA secrets would begin to come to light, too. In December of that year, a sixty-seven-year-old former NSA staffer and developer for the agency’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team named Nghia Hoang Pho pleaded guilty to violating his security clearances. He’d taken home enormous troves of classified materials. He’d later tell a Maryland court that after bad performance reviews he’d merely sought to study the materials as a way to get ahead in his work. Pho was sentenced to sixty-six months in prison.

That case connected with another piece of the narrative reported by The Wall Street Journal from months earlier, claiming that Russian government hackers had used their access to the antivirus software of Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs to steal a vast collection of NSA files from the home computer of a contract employee of the agency. The contractor, the report stated, had been foolish enough to not only violate his clearances and bring the top secret material home but also to run Kaspersky’s software, which—like most antivirus programs—included a capability that allowed the program to upload files to the company’s remote servers for analysis.

Kaspersky responded in a statement, denying that it had any “inappropriate ties” to the Russian government that might have let Kremlin hackers exploit its antivirus code. A few weeks later, the company followed up with the results of an internal investigation: It had, the company admitted, uploaded a collection of NSA hacking tools in 2014. But it claimed to have immediately deleted them upon discovering what the files represented.*3

Even as those clues added to the circumstantial evidence of Russia’s responsibility for the leak of the NSA’s secret armory, nothing suggested that either the Shadow Brokers or WannaCry was connected to Sandworm. But just as artists inspire one another, Sandworm was no doubt watching and learning from its hacker peers. The Shadow Brokers had made available a powerful hacking tool that a team of hyper-bellicose cyberwarriors could hardly ignore.

The WannaCry worm that followed offered Sandworm a chance to observe a weapon of mass disruption in action—and, it would turn out, a few ideas about how to build an even more explosive one.

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