IANS | 17 Apr, 2017
An anonymous hacking
group "Shadow Brokers" that leaked online a collection of powerful
hacking tools allegedly used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) has also
published another set of documents that indicate that NSA penetrated the SWIFT
banking network in the Middle East.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) provides
a network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive
information about financial transactions in a secure, standardised and reliable
environment.
"This reportedly gave the US spy service a window into the financial
activities of a range of organisations, including those belonging to firms in
Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories,"
said a report in The Wired on Saturday.
Meanwhile, EastNets Service Bureau, that provides outsourced SWIFT connectivity,
on Saturday denied that its bureau was compromised and said that the reports of
hack are "totally false and unfounded".
"The reports of an alleged hacker-compromised EastNets Service Bureau
(ENSB) network is totally false and unfounded. The EastNets Network internal
Security Unit has run a complete check of its servers and found no hacker
compromise or any vulnerabilities," the bureau said in a statement.
"The EastNets Service Bureau runs on a separate secure network that cannot
be accessed over the public networks. The photos shown on twitter, claiming
compromised information, is about pages that are outdated and obsolete,
generated on a low-level internal server that is retired since 2013," the
statement added.
EastNets is a Dubai-based firm that oversees payments in the global SWIFT
transaction system for dozens of client banks and other firms, particularly in
the Middle East.
The "Shadow Brokers" is a group of anonymous hackers that published
hacking tools used by the NSA last year.
According to experts, the leaks, published by the Shadow Brokers, target a
variety of Windows servers and Windows operating systems, including Windows 7
and Windows 8, CNN reported.
"They may have been used to target a global banking system. One collection
of 15 exploits contains at least four Windows hacks that researches have
already been able to replicate," the experts were quoted as saying.
"This is quite possibly the most damaging thing I've seen in the last
several years," said Matthew Hickey, founder of security firm Hacker
House.
"This puts a powerful nation state-level attack tool in the hands of
anyone who wants to download it to start targeting servers."
Shadow Brokers did not provide a coherent explanation of why they chose to
publish the Microsoft and SWIFT vulnerabilities.
According to another report in Fortune, the group -- believed to be tied to the
Russian government -- also released a set of confidential hacking tools used by
US intelligence organisation the NSA to exploit software vulnerabilities in
Microsoft Windows software.
The document dump -- which is mostly lines of computer code -- amounts to an
emergency for Microsoft because the hacks consist of a variety of
"zero-day exploits" that can serve to infiltrate Windows machines for
purposes of espionage, vandalism, or document theft.
A security executive who runs the Twitter account @HackerFantastic called the
development a "Microsoft apocalypse."
Other well-known figures in the security community also underscored the
severity of the event for Microsoft.