Equation Group - NSA dumper native English speaker?

Darren Pauli for The Register: 'NSA' hack okshun woz writ by Inglish speeker trieing to hyde - Linguist says perps of zero day dump wanted to pose as gramatically-incorrect aliens.

He's summarizing linguistic analysis by Shlomo Argamon of text from 'ShadowBroker' as posted on Pastebin. Argamon concludes that '...the author is most likely a native speaker of US English who is attempting to sound like a non-native speaker by inserting a variety of random grammatical errors.'

You may not be convinced by the conclusion, especially if you're as wary of attribution as I am, but you may well find the analysis interesting nonetheless, if you're not familiar with textual analysis methodologies. And the theory would dovetail with the speculation that the perpetrator was actually an insider: Former NSA Staffers: Rogue Insider Could Be Behind NSA Data Dump.

David Harley
ESET Senior Research Fellow