Last August, an unknown group called the Shadow Brokers released a bunch of NSA tools to the public. The common guesses were that the tools were discovered on an external staging server, and that the hack and release was the work of the Russians (back then, that wasn't controversial). This was me:
Okay, so let's think about the game theory here. Some group stole all of this data in 2013 and kept it secret for three years. Now they want the world to know it was stolen. Which governments might behave this way? The obvious list is short: China and Russia. Were I betting, I would bet Russia, and that it's a signal to the Obama Administration: "Before you even think of sanctioning us for the DNC hack, know where we've been and what we can do to you."
They published a second, encrypted, file. My speculation:
They claim to be auctioning off the rest of the data to the highest bidder. I think that's PR nonsense. More likely, that second file is random nonsense, and this is all we're going to get. It's a lot, though.
I was wrong. On November 1, the Shadow Brokers released some more documents, and two days ago they released the key to that original encrypted archive:
EQGRP-Auction-Files is CrDj"(;Va.*NdlnzB9M?@K2)#>deB7mN
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 12 2017, @05:45PM
The NSA does spend a lot of time reviewing and advising on security of military electronics.
People with a Clearance get to know what the NSA found and deems high-risk or not worth keeping secret. They don't know what the NSA keeps to itself, but they can fix more issues than the rest of us (including the other guys).