NSA hacked

The Equation Group is a hacker collective, believed to be working for the NSA. It has been reported that the group has been hacked by The Shadow Brokers. The Shadow Brokers claims to have infiltrated The Equation Group, and are dumping its hacked data online. GitHub quickly disabled the group's repository. It was revealed that most of the data it grabbed was Bitcoin auctions and a cache of hack tools known as binaries. NSA contractor-turned-privacy advocate Edward Snowden took this matter to Twitter. According to him, these tools are uploaded onto an NSA staging server as part of on-going operations to target and trace rival malware servers. The practice is known as Counter Computer Network Exploitation, or CCNE - a process that allows NSA hackers to steal tools used by foreign or domestic rival hackers in order to fingerprint them. Once fingerprinted, the NSA can identify tools that were used in other attacks and begin to trace their origin. So here the hackers that leaked the data also provided unique fingerprints from state sponsored hacking tools.