TAO: The NSA’s Hacker Plumber Wunderkinds

TAO’s repertoire of attacks included unpublished exploits and back-doors for products from major US IT companies like Microsoft and Cisco, as well as foreign companies like Huawei. Spiegel reports that TAO infiltrated networks in 89 countries, including “the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries.” They took special interest in Mexico’s anti-terror efforts, running an operation called WHITETAMALE that compromised the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.

The tactics deployed by TAO relied upon other NSA programs, like the infamous XKeyscore, which was used to passively intercept crash reports from…