The National Security Agency has rebranded its elite hacking division, though the new name will be familiar to anyone who has followed the spy agency’s history of offensive cyber operations.
NSA last week changed the moniker of its Office of Computer Network Operations (CNO) back to Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a name that is sure to elicit nostalgia among the broader digital community for a group with roots in the early 1990s.
The switch is part of a reorganization by NSA’s new leadership to make the largest electronic spy agency in the world more adept at facing evolving digital threats from China, Russia and others.
The move undoes some of a previous internal reshuffle, which was dubbed NSA21. That campaign, launched in 2016, restructured offensive operations and intelligence collection into broader directorates rather than keeping TAO as a standalone office. NSA Deputy Director Tim Kosiba, who previously worked in TAO, spearheaded the latest change.
“NSA21 was not looked at as a useful thing,” said a former agency employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were on a path to move developers and operators closer. They split them apart instead. I think they just look at that back as the heyday of the operations, so there’s a nostalgia there.”
The revamped structure was briefed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week when he visited Fort Meade, Maryland, which is home to both NSA and U.S. Cyber Command. The Pentagon chief shared a picture of a TAO hat he had signed on his official X account.
Other former NSA personnel believe that bringing the two sides back together again under one roof (literally, as TAO is expected to open its own building on the Fort Meade campus next month) will speed up operations and boost creativity when it comes to breaking into hard-to-access networks, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.
“TAO restores a powerful identity that has resonated deeply,” an NSA spokesperson said. “TAO has a strong history of mission outcomes and we are honoring it and using the weight it carries to propel us into the future.”
As its name suggests, TAO makes and deploys tools that are custom-fitted to penetrate the computer networks of foreign targets for espionage purposes, fashioning implants and other methods that are coded entirely in software it creates. The secretive unit helped craft the cyber weapon known as Stuxnet that was used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
The unit was thrust into the spotlight roughly a decade ago when a mysterious internet group calling itself the Shadow Brokers surfaced online to advertise the sale of its stolen hacking techniques. The U.S. believed that Russia and North Korea capitalized on pilfered tools to unleash devastating global cyberattacks — most famously in 2017 when the WannaCry ransomware used an exploit called EternalBlue. It swept across 150 countries, infecting 200,000 organizations.
Around the same time federal prosecutors indicted a former NSA contractor, Harold Martin, with hoarding massive amounts of classified information at his Maryland home. Martin worked at the NSA from 2012 to 2015 as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, including a stint in TAO.
However, investigators never found proof that Martin, who was sentenced in 2019 to nine years in prison, had shared the stolen secrets with anyone else.
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