The NSA has its own team of elite hackers

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/the-nsa-has-its-own-team-of-elite-hackers/

By Andrea Peterson
The Switch
Washington Post
August 29, 2013

Our Post colleagues have had a busy day. First, they released documents 
revealing the U.S. intelligence budget from National Security Agency (NSA) 
leaker Edward Snowden. Then they recounted exactly how the hunt for Osama 
bin Laden went down.

In that second report, Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman shared a few 
tidbits about the role of the government’s hacking unit, Tailored Access 
Operations (TAO) in the hunt, writing that TAO “enabled the NSA to collect 
intelligence from mobile phones that were used by al-Qaeda operatives and 
other ‘persons of interest’ in the bin Laden hunt.”

So just what is Tailored Access Operations? According to a profile by 
Matthew M. Aid for Foreign Policy, it’s a highly secret but incredibly 
important NSA program that collects intelligence about foreign targets by 
hacking into their computers, stealing data, and monitoring 
communications. Aid claims TAO is also responsible for developing programs 
that could destroy or damage foreign computers and networks via 
cyberattacks if commanded to do so by the president.

So, TAO might have had something to do with the development of Stuxnet and 
Flame, malware programs thought to have been jointly developed by the U.S. 
and Israel. The malware initially targeted the Iranian nuclear program, 
but quickly made its way into the digital wild.

[...]

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