Move Aside, NSA: WikiLeaks Release Shows CIA Can Hack Even Through Encrypted Apps

WikiLeaks has published a damning report on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, showing the organization has profoundly deep and potent hacking tools that allow it to bypass most encryption protection and extract data without government permission and without users ever knowing they are being hacked.

Code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency. The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Virgina.

“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones, WikiLeaks says.

By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

Wikileaks says that it has carefully reviewed the “Year Zero” disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of armed cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such weapons should analyzed, disarmed and published.tion, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

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