They could be, according to a cyber criminal group who claims to have hacked the NSA, and developed a tool kit to compromise the Agency’s routers…
The group is called the “Shadow Brokers”, and they’re reporting to have a tool kit that can be used to infiltrate the NSA. To back up their claims, the group has posted an attack code, which according to several experts, appears to be legitimate. The code impacts routers built by Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and Fortinet Inc.
A Cisco representative reported after further investigation, no new vulnerabilities were present. Unfortunately, Juniper and Forinet representatives have failed to comment on the issue.
If the attack code is indeed legitimate, it could intercept traffic passing through the impacted routers. The Shadow Brokers are offering up this tool kit for one million bitcoin, which translates into about $568 million USD.
The origin of this information is unknown. The group is accrediting it to hacking the systems. PC Pitstop’s Vice President of Cyber Security, Dodi Glenn, shared his thoughts on the potential validity of this tool kit, as well as the potential hack against NSA,
“While the exploits from the Shadow Brokers Group may have been used at one time by the NSA, it is unlikely that the NSA was actually hacked. Actual access into the NSA’s systems wouldn’t be something that a hacker would openly brag about, as it is too valuable on the underground networks.
Additionally, anyone can download the 250MB of “preview files” from the PasteBin link, http://pastebin.com/NDTU5kJQ, and see that the files go back to 2013, with folders dating back to 2010.
I don’t believe we will be seeing any zero-day exploits coming out of these dumps. “
