NSA Open Sources its Linux-based Cyber Security Tool

The American security Agency NSA is infamous for its mass surveillance programs. Every alternate day, we are greeted with new revelations regarding its policies and tools being used to track people. Recently, it was announced that NSA will be continuing its phone spying program for another six months. Putting aside the numerous allegations, NSA has open sourced one of its cyber security tools.

The security agency has released the source code of the system integrity management platform, SIMP, on GitHub. NSA has taken this step to help the government departments and private organizations to improve their security measures.

SIMP aims to enhance the network security systems’ efficiency by keeping them updated and compliant with the latest security standards. It is a part of a layered and defense-in-depth approach to the security. NSA says that this cyber security tool release is to avoid duplicity as certain US governments and groups were trying to forge the tool to meet the minimum security standards set by US intelligence and defense bodies.

At this point of time, only RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) versions 7.1 and 6.6 and CentOS versions 7.1-1503-01 and 6.6 are supporting SIMP.

Such programs and open sourcing efforts have seen the daylight due to the leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.