Shadow Brokers, which released a dump of material earlier this year from the Equation Group that contained NSA-created exploit tools — which has long been suspected of being an NSA front organisation — also issued a long, rambling message in English that appears to be deliberately mangled.

The list of compromised servers, once again obtained from the Equation Group, shows servers in many countries: Japan, South Korea, Belgium, India, Hungary, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Germany, Sweden, China, Greece, Finland, Chile, Taiwan and many more.

The Shadow Brokers also released the means to gain entry to any of these servers. A total of 306 were listed.

Security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam, a former member of Lulzsec and the Anonymous hacking collective, commented on Twitter that all of the target servers had been compromised between 2000 and 2010, adding that it was likely that most had been cleaned up unless they had disk back-ups.

He observed that most of the servers seemed to be running versions of Solaris. A few were running Linux or FreeBSD.

So the NSA hacked a British ISP (Colt) to use them as a guinea pig for covering their tracks. pic.twitter.com/hM4PgmPxps

— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) 31 October 2016

"So even the NSA hacks machines from compromised servers in China and Russia. This is why attribution is hard," Bassam wrote.

In its message, Shadow Brokers asked why the US was looking to wage a cyber war on Russia using the CIA and not the NSA or the Cyber Command.

It poked fun at the American election process, questioning how everyone could be said to have equal power at the ballot box when different people had vastly different sums at their command to influence the polls.

Shadow Brokers suggested that the best way to influence the polls was not by keeping away, but rather by stopping the elections altogether.

Some of the IPs of servers said to have been compromised by the NSA.

"TheShadowBrokers is having suggestion. On November 8th, instead of not voting, maybe be stopping the vote all together? Maybe being grinch who stopped election from coming? Maybe hacking election is being the best idea? #hackelection2016," the group wrote.

"If peoples is not being hackers, then #disruptelection2016, #disruptcorruption2016. Maybe peoples not be going to work, be finding local polling places and protesting, blocking, disrupting, smashing equipment, tearing up ballots?

"The wealthy elites is being weakest during elections and transition of power. Is being why USSA is targeting elections in foreign countries. Don’t beleiving? Remembering Iran elections? Rembering stuxnet? Maybe is not Russia hacking election, maybe is being payback from Iran?"