Tag Archives: breaches

Serious F5 Breach

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/serious-f5-breach.html

This is bad:

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings that some customers used inside their networks.

Control of the build system and access to the source code, customer configurations, and documentation of unpatched vulnerabilities has the potential to give the hackers unprecedented knowledge of weaknesses and the ability to exploit them in supply-chain attacks on thousands of networks, many of which are sensitive. The theft of customer configurations and other data further raises the risk that sensitive credentials can be abused, F5 and outside security experts said.

F5 announcement.

DOGE as a National Cyberattack

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-national.html

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the US Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly $5.45 trillion in annual federal payments.

Then, we learned that uncleared DOGE personnel had gained access to classified data from the US Agency for International Development, possibly copying it onto their own systems. Next, the Office of Personnel Management—which holds detailed personal data on millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances—was compromised. After that, Medicaid and Medicare records were compromised.

Meanwhile, only partially redacted names of CIA employees were sent over an unclassified email account. DOGE personnel are also reported to be feeding Education Department data into artificial intelligence software, and they have also started working at the Department of Energy.

This story is moving very fast. On Feb. 8, a federal judge blocked the DOGE team from accessing the Treasury Department systems any further. But given that DOGE workers have already copied data and possibly installed and modified software, it’s unclear how this fixes anything.

In any case, breaches of other critical government systems are likely to follow unless federal employees stand firm on the protocols protecting national security.

The systems that DOGE is accessing are not esoteric pieces of our nation’s infrastructure—they are the sinews of government.

For example, the Treasury Department systems contain the technical blueprints for how the federal government moves money, while the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) network contains information on who and what organizations the government employs and contracts with.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant US security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

In this case, external operators with limited experience and minimal oversight are doing their work in plain sight and under massive public scrutiny: gaining the highest levels of administrative access and making changes to the United States’ most sensitive networks, potentially introducing new security vulnerabilities in the process.

But the most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted. It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error. These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering. Sen. Ron Wyden said his office had learned that the attackers gained privileges that allow them to modify core programs in Treasury Department computers that verify federal payments, access encrypted keys that secure financial transactions, and alter audit logs that record system changes. Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network. They are also reportedly training AI software on all of this sensitive data.

This is much more critical than the initial unauthorized access. These new servers have unknown capabilities and configurations, and there’s no evidence that this new code has gone through any rigorous security testing protocols. The AIs being trained are certainly not secure enough for this kind of data. All are ideal targets for any adversary, foreign or domestic, also seeking access to federal data.

There’s a reason why every modification—hardware or software—to these systems goes through a complex planning process and includes sophisticated access-control mechanisms. The national security crisis is that these systems are now much more vulnerable to dangerous attacks at the same time that the legitimate system administrators trained to protect them have been locked out.

By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.

Now, the technical details of how these systems operate, their security protocols, and their vulnerabilities are now potentially exposed to unknown parties without any of the usual safeguards. Instead of having to breach heavily fortified digital walls, these parties  can simply walk through doors that are being propped open—and then erase evidence of their actions.

The security implications span three critical areas.

First, system manipulation: External operators can now modify operations while also altering audit trails that would track their changes. Second, data exposure: Beyond accessing personal information and transaction records, these operators can copy entire system architectures and security configurations—in one case, the technical blueprint of the country’s federal payment infrastructure. Third, and most critically, is the issue of system control: These operators can alter core systems and authentication mechanisms while disabling the very tools designed to detect such changes. This is more than modifying operations; it is modifying the infrastructure that those operations use.

To address these vulnerabilities, three immediate steps are essential. First, unauthorized access must be revoked and proper authentication protocols restored. Next, comprehensive system monitoring and change management must be reinstated—which, given the difficulty of cleaning a compromised system, will likely require a complete system reset. Finally, thorough audits must be conducted of all system changes made during this period.

This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.

Each day of continued unrestricted access makes the eventual recovery more difficult and increases the risk of irreversible damage to these critical systems. While the full impact may take time to assess, these steps represent the minimum necessary actions to begin restoring system integrity and security protocols.

Assuming that anyone in the government still cares.

This essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer, and originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Former Uber CISO Appealing His Conviction

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/10/former-uber-ciso-appealing-his-conviction.html

Joe Sullivan, Uber’s CEO during their 2016 data breach, is appealing his conviction.

Prosecutors charged Sullivan, whom Uber hired as CISO after the 2014 breach, of withholding information about the 2016 incident from the FTC even as its investigators were scrutinizing the company’s data security and privacy practices. The government argued that Sullivan should have informed the FTC of the 2016 incident, but instead went out of his way to conceal it from them.

Prosecutors also accused Sullivan of attempting to conceal the breach itself by paying $100,000 to buy the silence of the two hackers behind the compromise. Sullivan had characterized the payment as a bug bounty similar to ones that other companies routinely make to researchers who report vulnerabilities and other security issues to them. His lawyers pointed out that Sullivan had made the payment with the full knowledge and blessing of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO at the time, and other members of the ride-sharing giant’s legal team.

But prosecutors described the payment and an associated nondisclosure agreement that Sullivan’s team wanted the hackers to sign as an attempt to cover up what was in effect a felony breach of Uber’s network.

[…]

Sullivan’s fate struck a nerve with many peers and others in the industry who perceived CISOs as becoming scapegoats for broader security failures at their companies. Many argued ­ and continue to argue ­ that Sullivan acted with the full knowledge of his supervisors but in the end became the sole culprit for the breach and the associated failures for which he was charged. They believed that if Sullivan could be held culpable for his failure to report the 2016 breach to the FTC ­- and for the alleged hush payment—then so should Kalanick at the very least, and probably others as well.

It’s an argument that Sullivan’s lawyers once again raised in their appeal of the obstruction conviction this week. “Despite the fact that Mr. Sullivan was not responsible at Uber for the FTC’s investigation, including the drafting or signing any of the submissions to the FTC, the government singled him out among over 30 of his co-employees who all had information that Mr. Sullivan is alleged to have hidden from the FTC,” Swaminathan said.

I have some sympathy for that view. Sullivan was almost certainly scapegoated here. But I do want executives personally liable for what their company does. I don’t know enough about the details to have an opinion in this particular case.

How Attorneys Are Harming Cybersecurity Incident Response

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/how-attorneys-are-harming-cybersecurity-incident-response.html

New paper: “Lessons Lost: Incident Response in the Age of Cyber Insurance and Breach Attorneys“:

Abstract: Incident Response (IR) allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of these goals, technical practitioners are increasingly influenced by stakeholders like cyber insurers and lawyers. This paper explores these impacts via a multi-stage, mixed methods research design that involved 69 expert interviews, data on commercial relationships, and an online validation workshop. The first stage of our study established 11 stylized facts that describe how cyber insurance sends work to a small numbers of IR firms, drives down the fee paid, and appoints lawyers to direct technical investigators. The second stage showed that lawyers when directing incident response often: introduce legalistic contractual and communication steps that slow-down incident response; advise IR practitioners not to write down remediation steps or to produce formal reports; and restrict access to any documents produced.

So, we’re not able to learn from these breaches because the attorneys are limiting what information becomes public. This is where we think about shielding companies from liability in exchange for making breach data public. It’s the sort of thing we do for airplane disasters.

EDITED TO ADD (6/13): A podcast interview with two of the authors.

SolarWinds Detected Six Months Earlier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/solarwinds-detected-six-months-earlier.html

New reporting from Wired reveals that the Department of Justice detected the SolarWinds attack six months before Mandiant detected it in December 2020, but didn’t realize what it detected—and so ignored it.

WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months earlier, in late May 2020­—but the scale and significance of the breach wasn’t immediately apparent. Suspicions were triggered when the department detected unusual traffic emanating from one of its servers that was running a trial version of the Orion software suite made by SolarWinds, according to sources familiar with the incident. The software, used by system administrators to manage and configure networks, was communicating externally with an unfamiliar system on the internet. The DOJ asked the security firm Mandiant to help determine whether the server had been hacked. It also engaged Microsoft, though it’s not clear why the software maker was also brought onto the investigation.

[…]

Investigators suspected the hackers had breached the DOJ server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the Orion software. They reached out to SolarWinds to assist with the inquiry, but the company’s engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. In July 2020, with the mystery still unresolved, communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. A month later, the DOJ purchased the Orion system, suggesting that the department was satisfied that there was no further threat posed by the Orion suite, the sources say.

EDITED TO ADD (5/4): More details about the SolarWinds attack from Wired.com.

SolarWinds and Market Incentives

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/solarwinds-and-market-incentives.html

In early 2021, IEEE Security and Privacy asked a number of board members for brief perspectives on the SolarWinds incident while it was still breaking news. This was my response.

The penetration of government and corporate networks worldwide is the result of inadequate cyberdefenses across the board. The lessons are many, but I want to focus on one important one we’ve learned: the software that’s managing our critical networks isn’t secure, and that’s because the market doesn’t reward that security.

SolarWinds is a perfect example. The company was the initial infection vector for much of the operation. Its trusted position inside so many critical networks made it a perfect target for a supply-chain attack, and its shoddy security practices made it an easy target.

Why did SolarWinds have such bad security? The answer is because it was more profitable. The company is owned by Thoma Bravo partners, a private-equity firm known for radical cost-cutting in the name of short-term profit. Under CEO Kevin Thompson, the company underspent on security even as it outsourced software development. The New York Times reports that the company’s cybersecurity advisor quit after his “basic recommendations were ignored.” In a very real sense, SolarWinds profited because it secretly shifted a whole bunch of risk to its customers: the US government, IT companies, and others.

This problem isn’t new, and, while it’s exacerbated by the private-equity funding model, it’s not unique to it. In general, the market doesn’t reward safety and security—especially when the effects of ignoring those things are long term and diffuse. The market rewards short-term profits at the expense of safety and security. (Watch and see whether SolarWinds suffers any long-term effects from this hack, or whether Thoma Bravo’s bet that it could profit by selling an insecure product was a good one.)

The solution here is twofold. The first is to improve government software procurement. Software is now critical to national security. Any system of procuring that software needs to evaluate the security of the software and the security practices of the company, in detail, to ensure that they are sufficient to meet the security needs of the network they’re being installed in. If these evaluations are made public, along with the list of companies that meet them, all network buyers can benefit from them. It’s a win for everybody.

But that isn’t enough; we need a second part. The only way to force companies to provide safety and security features for customers is through regulation. This is true whether we want seat belts in our cars, basic food safety at our restaurants, pajamas that don’t catch on fire, or home routers that aren’t vulnerable to cyberattack. The government needs to set minimum security standards for software that’s used in critical network applications, just as it sets software standards for avionics.

Without these two measures, it’s just too easy for companies to act like SolarWinds: save money by skimping on safety and security and hope for the best in the long term. That’s the rational thing for companies to do in an unregulated market, and the only way to change that is to change the economic incentives.

This essay originally appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.” I forgot to publish it here.

LastPass Breach

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/lastpass-breach.html

Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse:

While no customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident, some source code and technical information were stolen from our development environment and used to target another employee, obtaining credentials and keys which were used to access and decrypt some storage volumes within the cloud-based storage service.

[…]

To date, we have determined that once the cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys were obtained, the threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service.

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

That’s bad. It’s not an epic disaster, though.

These encrypted fields remain secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture. As a reminder, the master password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or maintained by LastPass.

So, according to the company, if you chose a strong master password—here’s my advice on how to do it—your passwords are safe. That is, you are secure as long as your password is resilient to a brute-force attack. (That they lost customer data is another story….)

Fair enough, as far as it goes. My guess is that many LastPass users do not have strong master passwords, even though the compromise of your encrypted password file should be part of your threat model. But, even so, note this unverified tweet:

I think the situation at @LastPass may be worse than they are letting on. On Sunday the 18th, four of my wallets were compromised. The losses are not significant. Their seeds were kept, encrypted, in my lastpass vault, behind a 16 character password using all character types.

If that’s true, it means that LastPass has some backdoor—possibly unintentional—into the password databases that the hackers are accessing. (Or that @Cryptopathic’s “16 character password using all character types” is something like “P@ssw0rdP@ssw0rd.”)

My guess is that we’ll learn more during the coming days. But this should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone who is using the cloud: the cloud is another name for “someone else’s computer,” and you need to understand how much or how little you trust that computer.

If you’re changing password managers, look at my own Password Safe. Its main downside is that you can’t synch between devices, but that’s because I don’t use the cloud for anything.

News articles. Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD: People choose lousy master passwords.

Twitter Exposes Personal Information for 5.4 Million Accounts

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/twitter-exposes-personal-information-for-5-4-million-accounts.html

Twitter accidentally exposed the personal information—including phone numbers and email addresses—for 5.4 million accounts. And someone was trying to sell this information.

In January 2022, we received a report through our bug bounty program of a vulnerability in Twitter’s systems. As a result of the vulnerability, if someone submitted an email address or phone number to Twitter’s systems, Twitter’s systems would tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number was associated with, if any. This bug resulted from an update to our code in June 2021. When we learned about this, we immediately investigated and fixed it. At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability.

In July 2022, we learned through a press report that someone had potentially leveraged this and was offering to sell the information they had compiled. After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.

This includes anonymous accounts.

This comment has it right:

So after forcing users to enter a phone number to continue using twitter, despite twitter having no need to know the users phone number, they then leak the phone numbers and associated accounts. Great.

But it gets worse… After being told of the leak in January, rather than disclosing the fact millions of users data had been open for anyone who looked, they quietly fixed it and hoped nobody else had found it.

It was only when the press started to notice they finally disclosed the leak.

That isn’t just one bug causing a security leak—it’s a chain of bad decisions and bad security culture, and if anything should attract government fines for lax data security, this is it.

Twitter’s blog post unhelpfully goes on to say:

If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

Three news articles.

More on the SolarWinds Breach

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/more-on-the-solarwinds-breach.html

The New York Times has more details.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update –­ a Trojan horse of sorts ­– that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.

Among those who use SolarWinds software are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Justice Department, parts of the Pentagon and a number of utility companies. While the presence of the software is not by itself evidence that each network was compromised and information was stolen, investigators spent Monday trying to understand the extent of the damage in what could be a significant loss of American data to a foreign attacker.

It’s unlikely that the SVR (a successor to the KGB) penetrated all of those networks. But it is likely that they penetrated many of the important ones. And that they have buried themselves into those networks, giving them persistent access even if this vulnerability is patched. This is a massive intelligence coup for the Russians and failure for the Americans, even if no classified networks were touched.

Meanwhile, CISA has directed everyone to remove SolarWinds from their networks. This is (1) too late to matter, and (2) likely to take many months to complete. Probably the right answer, though.

This is almost too stupid to believe:

In one previously unreported issue, multiple criminals have offered to sell access to SolarWinds’ computers through underground forums, according to two researchers who separately had access to those forums.

One of those offering claimed access over the Exploit forum in 2017 was known as “fxmsp” and is wanted by the FBI “for involvement in several high-profile incidents,” said Mark Arena, chief executive of cybercrime intelligence firm Intel471. Arena informed his company’s clients, which include U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds’ update server by using the password “solarwinds123”

“This could have been done by any attacker, easily,” Kumar said.

Neither the password nor the stolen access is considered the most likely source of the current intrusion, researchers said.

That last sentence is important, yes. But the sloppy security practice is likely not an isolated incident, and speaks to the overall lack of security culture at the company.

And I noticed that SolarWinds has removed its customer page, presumably as part of its damage control efforts. I quoted from it. Did anyone save a copy?

EDITED TO ADD: Both the Wayback Machine and Brian Krebs have saved the SolarWinds customer page.

How the SolarWinds Hackers Bypassed Duo’s Multi-Factor Authentication

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/how-the-solarwinds-hackers-bypassed-duo-multi-factor-authentication.html

This is interesting:

Toward the end of the second incident that Volexity worked involving Dark Halo, the actor was observed accessing the e-mail account of a user via OWA. This was unexpected for a few reasons, not least of which was the targeted mailbox was protected by MFA. Logs from the Exchange server showed that the attacker provided username and password authentication like normal but were not challenged for a second factor through Duo. The logs from the Duo authentication server further showed that no attempts had been made to log into the account in question. Volexity was able to confirm that session hijacking was not involved and, through a memory dump of the OWA server, could also confirm that the attacker had presented cookie tied to a Duo MFA session named duo-sid.

Volexity’s investigation into this incident determined the attacker had accessed the Duo integration secret key (akey) from the OWA server. This key then allowed the attacker to derive a pre-computed value to be set in the duo-sid cookie. After successful password authentication, the server evaluated the duo-sid cookie and determined it to be valid. This allowed the attacker with knowledge of a user account and password to then completely bypass the MFA set on the account. It should be noted this is not a vulnerability with the MFA provider and underscores the need to ensure that all secrets associated with key integrations, such as those with an MFA provider, should be changed following a breach.

Again, this is not a Duo vulnerability. From ArsTechnica:

While the MFA provider in this case was Duo, it just as easily could have involved any of its competitors. MFA threat modeling generally doesn’t include a complete system compromise of an OWA server. The level of access the hacker achieved was enough to neuter just about any defense.

FireEye Hacked

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/fireeye-hacked.html

FireEye was hacked by — they believe — “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities”:

During our investigation to date, we have found that the attacker targeted and accessed certain Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security. These tools mimic the behavior of many cyber threat actors and enable FireEye to provide essential diagnostic security services to our customers. None of the tools contain zero-day exploits. Consistent with our goal to protect the community, we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen Red Team tools.

We are not sure if the attacker intends to use our Red Team tools or to publicly disclose them. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, we have developed more than 300 countermeasures for our customers, and the community at large, to use in order to minimize the potential impact of the theft of these tools.

We have seen no evidence to date that any attacker has used the stolen Red Team tools. We, as well as others in the security community, will continue to monitor for any such activity. At this time, we want to ensure that the entire security community is both aware and protected against the attempted use of these Red Team tools. Specifically, here is what we are doing:

  • We have prepared countermeasures that can detect or block the use of our stolen Red Team tools.
  • We have implemented countermeasures into our security products.
  • We are sharing these countermeasures with our colleagues in the security community so that they can update their security tools.
  • We are making the countermeasures publicly available on our GitHub.
  • We will continue to share and refine any additional mitigations for the Red Team tools as they become available, both publicly and directly with our security partners.

Consistent with a nation-state cyber-espionage effort, the attacker primarily sought information related to certain government customers. While the attacker was able to access some of our internal systems, at this point in our investigation, we have seen no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated data from our primary systems that store customer information from our incident response or consulting engagements, or the metadata collected by our products in our dynamic threat intelligence systems. If we discover that customer information was taken, we will contact them directly.

From the New York Times:

The hack was the biggest known theft of cybersecurity tools since those of the National Security Agency were purloined in 2016 by a still-unidentified group that calls itself the ShadowBrokers. That group dumped the N.S.A.’s hacking tools online over several months, handing nation-states and hackers the “keys to the digital kingdom,” as one former N.S.A. operator put it. North Korea and Russia ultimately used the N.S.A.’s stolen weaponry in destructive attacks on government agencies, hospitals and the world’s biggest conglomerates ­- at a cost of more than $10 billion.

The N.S.A.’s tools were most likely more useful than FireEye’s since the U.S. government builds purpose-made digital weapons. FireEye’s Red Team tools are essentially built from malware that the company has seen used in a wide range of attacks.

Russia is presumed to be the attacker.

Reuters article. Boing Boing post. Slashdot thread. Wired article.