I don't think the ancient nature of the exploit chain has much bearing on the origin. I think it points away from the actual 2025 campaigns being USG-attached, but I don't think anyone was suggesting that to start with - the Google report makes it pretty clear that they believe the same code was resold to several parties, either in parallel or sequentially, around this time frame.

I think the notion here is that either:

* There's a shared upstream origin or author between this toolkit and the Operation Triangulation toolkit ahead of the use in Operation Triangulation (ie - someone sold this chain to both the Operation Triangulation authors and a third party). I actually think that the uses of specifically structured code-names internally and the overall structure of the codebase described in the Google writeup make this theory less likely; building an exploit toolkit while using these practices to cosplay as a US-government affiliated engineer would be clever and fun, but it's not something we've really seen before.

* This toolkit originated from (whether it was leaked, compromised, or resold) the same actor who was responsible for Operation Triangulation.

> Maybe this was the Fisheries Department exploit toolkit.

buried lede, but hilarious