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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