By Aaron Miller=
WikiLeaks- the controversial online site at the heart of the U.S elections cyber attack drama and revelations, has announced today that it has obtained a vast portion of the CIA’s computer hacking arsenal.
Wikileaks posted the files online in a frightening breach that may expose some of the U.S. intelligence community’s most closely guarded cyber weapons.
In a move aimed at showcasing the depths of its breach of security and revelation of secret information, Wikileaks gloated in its extensive trove, describing it as ”exceeding in scale and significance, in reference to the massive collection of National Security Agency documents exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
A statement from WikiLeaks expresses its plans to post nearly 9,000 files describing code developed in secret by the CIA to steal data from targets overseas and turn ordinary devices including cell phones, computers and even television sets into surveillance tools. The revelations may turn out to be a bombshell that will alert many Americans, and indeed the world to the hacking devices spoken about which will no doubt be viewed as a breach to confidential tools used by the government, which themselves will be seen as a breach of the privacy of ordinary citizens.
A CIA spokesman told the eye of media.com “we do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents,” adding that nothing further to this statement is being given out.
WikiLeaks claim to have obtained the files from a current or former CIA contractor, claiming the source of the hacking to be former hackers of the government. Why the government would not have put measures in place to protect its practices and ensure former employees of theirs handed over all they have is unclear, perhaps, they were too busy to do so, or their professional hackers kept duplicate copies of material in their possession.Otherwise, common sense would suggest that sensitive material like that should be out of bounds, not out in the open as they surely are now.
Wikileaks said, “the archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”
“At first glance,” the data release “is probably legitimate or contains a lot of legitimate stuff, which means somebody managed to extract a lot of data from a classified CIA system and is willing to let the world know that,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.
TOOLS
WikiLeaks claim the trove comprised tools that include malware, viruses, trojans and weaponized “zero days” exploits developed by a CIA entity known as the Engineering Development Group. This group is part of a cyber directorate created in recent years.
The digital files are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in consumer devices including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android software and Samsung television sets, according to WikiLeaks, which labelled the trove “Year Zero.”
WikiLeaks said the files were created between 2013 and 2016, and that only a limited portion of the archive will be published, with some sensitive samples of code redacted “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program.”
The files also reveal information about the organisation of the CIA’s cyber directorate, with an organisation chart and files that indicate that the agency uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, as a hub of digital operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.