"Aren't we overlooking a rather more likely possibility here - that the NSA has itself been hacked?" That's the most obvious one to me. I thought everyone assu

"Aren't we overlooking a rather more likely possibility here - that the NSA has itself been hacked?" That's the most obvious one to me. I thought everyone assumed it until I saw some of these comment threads. If it's Russian, it probably goes back to Kaspersky tracking the Equation Group. They put together about everything about how they operated. Giving Russian intelligence this information combined with trip-wires or tip-offs on live activity by NSA hackers would let Russian hackers attempt to own their boxes. They could just work from there. Alternatively, it could be result of long-running infiltrations that U.S. government has been talking about for decades. At various points, U.S. TLA's said China is throwing piles of spies at us in a numbers game whereas Russia was using (I think it was) 4x more than during height of the Cold War. We also know they're easy to infiltrate and have terrible security since Snowden did and showed exactly that. Plus Manning just pulling everything they had from an Army private's account in Middle East. The leaks could've come from infiltrators, too. So, we have infiltrators, hackers via Kaspersky data (or similar), or insiders that for whatever reason want to humiliate them. Whatever Shadow Brokers say about themselves is just propaganda. They're one of the above with probably typical motivations of agents in those categories.