Jake Williams says that he was shocked last April when he woke up to the realization that he was at the center of the worst security debacle in the American intelligence history. The cybersecurity expert remembers that he was leading a training session in Orlando, Florida when the incident happened. Mr. Williams remembers that he got to understand what was happening through his Twitter account. In his company’s blog, Mr. Williams had recently written an article about a mysterious group known as Shadow Brokers. This is a group that is said to have accessed the hacking tools that were being used by American intelligence agencies to spy on other countries. Once the group got hold of the article, they decided to reply in an angry manner. The group managed to identify Mr. William by name correctly. The group further explained how he was a member of the NSA team that had been conducting the hacks. They explained that he was a member of the Tailored Access Operations yet he had never told the public about the job. The group didn’t stop there. They dropped technical details related to some classified hacking jobs that Mr. Williams had been part of. They wanted to prove they knew who he was. It was also an indication that the most secretive and largest intelligence agency had been hacked.
Mr. Williams says that the hackers managed to acquire information that even some members of the TAO group didn’t know. At the moment, Mr. Williams says that he works with a company known as Rendition Infosec. He said that when the information was leaked to the public, he felt as if he had been kicked in the gut. He further told the times that he thought that whoever wrote the comments about him must be an insider within the NSA who knew the details of the operation very well. At the same time, he couldn’t rule out the possibility of penetration. He was just part of the larger earthquake that had shaken NSA. The disclosures that began in 2016 have been referred to as disastrous to the NSA by former and current NSA workers. Former defense secretary Leon E. Panetta says that the leaks have affected the US intelligence very much. He says that the importance of any intelligence is to discover what the adversaries are up to without their knowledge. He says that the NSA has to start all over gains because of the leaks.
Dil Bole Oberoi
