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A Seized Silk Road Wallet is Moving Bitcoin to the NSA Hackers

Last week, a group called the “Shadow Brokers” claimed to have hacked the NSA – stealing their code, exploits and spy tools. They leaked bits of information on GitHub and claimed the information was stolen from the Equation Group, a group who most believe is a computer surveillance wing of the NSA. The Shadow Brokers says they will auction off the data to the highest bidder. Leaks from Edward Snowden have demonstrated that this hack is legit. (The Register) Security experts believe that the hacker group is Russian.

Now it appears that there are some Bitcoin moving from a seized Silk Road wallet to the Shadow Broker’s auction. This leads some experts to believe that “the US government is potentially bidding to prevent stolen NSA exploits and tools from ending up in the wrong hands”. It could also mean that the government might be making an attempt to trace where the Bitcoins are going. Additionally, it must be noted that the co-founder of a major Bitcoin investigation company says that payments are also going in the other direction. This could simply indicate that spam is being sent in very small payments to famous addresses. (ZDNet)

So far, the Shadow Brokers have collected around $1000 in Bitcoin payments – a far cry from the 1 million Bitcoins they have demanded (which would be worth just over a half a billion $USD at the time of this writing). The U.S. government seized several thousand Bitcoin when shutting down Silk Road, so this may be their source of funds when dealing with the Shadow Broker hackers.

Learn more about the Shadow Brokers hack of the NSA here:

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NSA Hoards Zero Days; Doesn’t Disclose Them all to Vendors

The NSA does not always disclose the zero day vulnerabilities it finds to unprotected vendors. Some security flaws are kept secret “when they can be used to serve a clear national security or law enforcement need” (Wired).

The US National Security Agency (NSA) was hacked by a suspected Russian hacker group and many of their exploits and hacking tools were archived. Leaked information was made public that showed the NSA collects exploits and does not always disclose them to vulnerable vendors. When vulnerabilities are not disclosed, problems do not get fixed. The NSA appears to operate “on the premise that secrets will never get out. That no one will ever discover the same bug. That no one will ever use the same bug. That there will never be a leak” (Business Insider).

Unfortunately, as we are currently witnessing with this recent leak, other types of hackers are able to find the same bugs and those hackers could have more malicious intent than the NSA. When hackers obtain a trove of U.S. secrets, that could put the government and corporations worldwide in a susceptible position. For example, the leaked data includes information on breaching popular commercial firewalls. Emergency service providers, governments, financial systems and many businesses all rely on these firewall technologies.

Global networking company, Cisco Systems, confirmed last week that the NSA exploited an undetected severe vulnerability that allows remote attackers “who have already gained a foothold in a targeted network to gain full control over a firewall” (Ars Technica). The NSA knew about this vulnerability since 2013 and did nothing to stop it. Now that the data is leaked, Cisco fears that the information “could be used to breach its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software used in its firewalls. An exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code and obtain full control of the system or to cause a reload of the affected system”. It can be argued that these exploits would have been patched had the NSA disclosed the vulnerabilities instead of collecting them for their own use.

(Watch – Snowden discusses NSA hack, Cisco to cut 5,500 jobs, NASA preps an asteroid rocket):

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Study Suggests Gamers Have Better Academic Performance

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia conducted a study that tested reading, math and science skills of students who were 15 years of age. One of the factors considered in the study was how much time each student spends playing video games. The results suggested that the students who gamed most days did way better in every category, “scoring 15 points above average in math and reading, and 17 points above average in science.” (Seeker)

One argument can be made that gamers tend to do better in school because smarter kids might be more likely to play games than others (correlation does not equal causation). Additionally, kids that played games every single day without any breaks in between actually did worse on the academic tests.

The idea that gamers are smarter is nothing new. In 2004, SourceFed released a video titled “16 Ways Video Games Make You Smarter” which discusses research that demonstrates video games actually improve cognitive skills:

A similar study last year determined that gamers have more grey matter and better brain connectivity (Science Alert). Gaming can have beneficial effects on your brain such as hand-eye coordination and improved cognitive control. It is worth noting that other tasks that require skill like sports and art will have a similar effect on brain development.

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