Was it the Y2K bug version 20.15-0708 that caused the New York Stock Exchange to be down for almost four hours, grounded flights at United Airlines for nearly two hours and brought the homepage down of the Wall Street Journal on 07 July 2015?

A group of hackers known as "The Shadow Brokers" claim to have stolen hacking tools (exploits) from another group of hackers called the "Equation Group" who are believed to have ties to the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The stolen data are now on auction to the highest bidder advertised via posts on a number of websites including Twitter, GitHub, Tumblr, Reddit, and Imgur.

A sample of the stolen tools and exploits have been released pending the outcome of the auction where the winner will apparently gain full access to the data.

The hacking tools could potentially include exploits for gaining root level access to networks, routers, and hard disk drives.