Document leakage showed NSA interest in cryptocurrency control

Recently, the user of the resource 4chan posted a photo of the document, which is a memorandum of one of the US Air Force units. This unit is engaged in a kind of cyber counterintelligence. So, judging by the contents of the memorandum , this unit previously joined forces with the NSA (NSA) to conduct a large-scale study of “Tor, I2P, VPN”. The document also states that additional funding is required to explore another area - the cryptocurrency.

"The success that was achieved in the study of Tor, I2P and VPN, is impossible with respect to cryptocurrency," - says the memorandum. “Additional research work is needed.” In principle, information security experts have long suspected the US authorities that they were still able to find vulnerabilities in communication protocols considered practically unavailable to hacking. If you trust a document that has fallen into the network, then we can assume that the military and cyber-intelligence officers have been successful in this direction.


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Of course, this information should be treated with a fair amount of skepticism, since the probability that a document was forged (more precisely, it was fabricated) is far from zero. Many 4chan users dream of “haipanut”, and in this case everything turned out. True, users of the same imageboard (and other resources covered by this image), who are familiar with the organization of work in government agencies, believe that all of this looks like reality. For example, the monitor of the terminal and the CAC access system are characteristic of such a department as the US Department of Defense.

True, it is not entirely clear why someone would want this snapshot to get into the network. There is an assumption that all this was started by someone with the aim of scaring the already-in-a-tense crypto-community. Cryptorisks have recently been pursued, if not failures, then unexpected news with a negative connotation. In a short time, market capitalization has almost halved.

Suspicion is caused by the fact that the publication Deepdotweb, which was one of the first to publish the news about this memorandum, announced a conversation with the developer Monero, who seemed to be "thinking that the document is authentic." However, the developer himself is not in the slightest spirit aware of this statement, allegedly expressed a few days ago. Rumors that someone confirms the reality of the document, it seems, are sewn with white thread.

It is also interesting that despite the apparent novelty of the message posted on 4chan, it is not new. The picture in question was posted on resources such as Steemit, Veekly and even Warosu about five months ago. The document, for obvious reasons, causes violent disputes about its authenticity.

Among other things, the document says that the crypto note technology is interesting to the intelligence agencies. This is a software layer that provides anonymity of tokens such as Bytecoin (BCN), Monero (XMR), Karbo (KRB) and Boolberry (BBR). Monero is most often used by attackers - for example, a new botnet that has infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world, it is Monero mine mining. This is because tracking transactions and participants in the system itself is quite difficult. Cryptocurrency has become widespread, and its course is gradually going up, because with increasing popularity, it is becoming more and more popular.

Currently, journalists of many publications are trying to clarify the origin of this document. Perhaps in the near future it will be possible to do it, and then it will become clear whether the NSA is really engaged in new research that is related to cryptocurrency. One should think that if such projects are implemented by the agency, some success can be expected - high-class specialists are working at the NSA, which showed Snowden's revelations and leaks organized by Wikileaks and the Shadow Brokers group. A number of exploits, developed by the agency, are still relevant to them, and they are successfully built into various backdoors and viruses. One such virus is Smominru , which earned over $ 3.6 million in dollars for its creators.