Solving the mystery of shadow hacker organization the Equation Group

An unnamed scientific researcher walks out to her mailbox, shuffles through some bills and advertisements, and pulls out an envelope containing a CD of pictures from a recent scientific conference the researcher had attended in Houston. Excited – though maybe a bit nervous – to see the candid photos of herself and her colleagues snapped by an excitable event photographer, the researcher walks inside, casually drops the unopened bills on the kitchen table, opens up her laptop, and slides in the CD. Windows asks if she’d like to open the pictures to view them. She accepts, and the pictures pop up in the photo viewer. One by one she clicks through them, viewing the photos from the event. She reminisces fondly, wincing only at that one photo where she looks either drunk or high, making mental note of the pictures to print out for her lab desk.

What the researcher doesn’t see, however, is a malicious payload – a virus, one of the most sophisticated known to man – secretly installing itself in the background of her computer. This virus would give a certain secret group of individuals complete access to her system, a group which had hijacked the package mid-transit in the mail, replaced the original CD with a copy that included the virus, taped everything back up without evidence of tampering, and sent the package on its way to her. The virus was practically untraceable and completely irremovable; it could map out networks, jump to computers not connected via the Internet, and even selectively target and destroy specific computers much like a bioengineered nano-virus – all at the direction of a secret shadow organization that was covertly infiltrating the world’s most secure computer systems.