Our recent research aims to shed more light on this topic, and reveal conclusive evidence that such a leak did actually take place years before the Shadow Brokers leak, resulting in 🇺🇸 US developed cyber tools reaching the hands of a 🇨🇳 Chinese group which repurposed them in order to attack US targets.
Cyber weapons are digital and volatile by nature. Stealing them and transferring from one continent to another, can be as simple as sending an email. They are also very obscure, and their mere existence is a closely guarded secret. That is exactly why, as opposed to a nuclear submarine, stealing a cyber-weapon can easily go under the radar and become a fact known only to a selected few.
The implications of such a scenario can be devastating, as the world have already experienced with the case of the Shadow Brokers leak, in which a mysterious group have decided to publicly publish a wide range of cyber weapons allegedly developed by the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit of the NSA – also referred to as the « Equation Group ».
