The WikiLeaks CIA Dump Shows Hacking Secrets of Your Phone
To be clear, I’m not worried about the CIA or NSA snooping my phone. Even FBI or ICE pose no threat given my non existent criminal enterprises. Thing is all kinds of bad guys use these exploits and tricks. That’s why I oppose any and all legislated/decreed backdoors into encryption algorithms or mobile devices.
The NSA, it seems, isn’t the only American spy agency hacking the world. Judging by a new, nearly 9,000-page trove of secrets from WikiLeaks, the CIA has developed its own surprisingly wide array of intrusion tools, too.
On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released what it’s calling Vault 7, an unprecedented collection of internal CIA files—what appear to be a kind of web-based Wiki—that catalog the agency’s apparent hacking techniques. And while the hoards of security researchers poring through the documents have yet to find any actual code among its spilled secrets, it details surprising capabilities, from dozens of exploits targeting Android and iOS to advanced PC-compromise techniques and detailed attempts to hack Samsung smart TVs, turning them into silent listening devices.
“It certainly seems that in the CIA toolkit there were more zero-day exploits than we’d estimated,” says Jason Healey, a director at the Atlantic Council think tank, who has focused on tracking how many of those “zero-days”—undisclosed, unpatched hacking techniques—the US government has stockpiled. Healey says that he had previously estimated American government agencies might have held onto less than a hundred of those secret exploits. “It looks like CIA might have that number just by itself.”