It’s tempting to link the release directly to the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails earlier this summer — and that leak all but dares observers to conclude that Russia was trying to shake up the U.S. presidential election. The dates associated with the scripts and signatures of the more recent leak suggest that the country (and the hackers) have had them for a while — at least since 2013. After an entity known as Guccifer 2.0 released the DNC information, anonymous officials inside the government publicly attributed the hacks to the Russian government. The evidence, they said, was clear.

Snowden, for his part, said that Russia might have used the new malware leak to warn the U.S. away from attributing specific cyber operations — including the DNC attack — to their government. “This leak looks like a somebody sending a message that an escalation in the attribution game could get messy fast,” he tweeted.

Another theory — one that is gaining some traction among experts outside the government — is that the Shadow Brokers release is the Russian response to an unknown-to-the-public U.S. government cyber operation against their country, one launched in retribution for the DNC hacks.