If Snowden had dribbled out descriptions of NSA programs and capabilities, the Shadow Brokers had just unleashed the capabilities themselves. The code and algorithms to exact mass destruction were now freely available to anyone with an ax to grind, or data to steal—the NSA’s worst nightmare essentially, the very scenario the VEP was designed to impede. But the cache was just a teaser, an advertisement for a much larger trove of NSA tools they planned to release to the highest bidder.
