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New Smoking Gun Further Ties NSA to Omnipotent “Equation Group” Hackers - Ars Technica

March 11, 2015

New Smoking Gun Further Ties NSA to Omnipotent “Equation Group” Hackers - Ars Technica

Ars Technica, by Dan Goodin

Researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have uncovered more evidence tying the US National Security Agency to a nearly omnipotent group of hackers who operated undetected for at least 14 years.

The Kaspersky researchers once again stopped short of saying the hacking collective they dubbed Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. Still, they heaped new findings on top of a mountain of existing evidence that already strongly implicated the spy agency. The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string "BACKSNARF_AB25" discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed "EquationDrug." "BACKSNARF," according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation, was the name of a project tied to the NSA's Tailored Access Operations. Read more.

New Smoking Gun Further Ties NSA to Omnipotent “Equation Group” Hackers - Ars Technica

New Smoking Gun Further Ties NSA to Omnipotent “Equation Group” Hackers - Ars Technica
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