Shadow Brokers Claim to Have Hacked NSA-Linked Equation Group

A collective going by the name the Shadow Brokers claimed on Monday it had hacked the Equation Group, an elite cyberattack group associated with the National Security Agency (NSA), and asked for one million bitcoin (about $568 million) in an auction for more details.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The files claimed to be the Equation Group’s hacking tools were uploaded by the Shadow Brokers on the Github hosting service on August 13, while on Monday, the group issued its manifesto on Tumblr.

"If our auction raises 1,000,000 (million) btc total, then we dump more Equation Group files, same quality, unencrypted, for free, to everyone," the group wrote on Tumblr.

Some names of the files hacked by the Shadow Brokers reportedly correspond with the names mentioned in the leaks of former NSA employee Edward Snowden.

The Equation Group was discovered by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab in 2015. It is believed to be an NSA-associated group that created various cyber weapons. The group was also allegedly involved in creation of the Stuxnet worm that attacked the Iranian nuclear program in 2010.