BY STAFF
WRITER 9 · PUBLISHED MARCH 7, 2017
On Tuesday, Wikileaks published thousands of documents that they
claim are confidential documents straight from the CIA’s Center for Cyber
Intelligence. The long-awaited release includes 8,761 documents that account
for “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.” Julian Assange says that the
released documents are the first batch in a series of “Vault 7” leaks.
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Wikileaks released this press release on their
website:
Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017,
WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency. 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 Langley, Virgina. It
follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political
parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
Recently, the CIA lost control of
the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans,
weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated
documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than
several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking
capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former
U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom
has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
“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.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained
political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency
(NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but
a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial
fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to
disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary
bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.
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. Such is the scale of the
CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that
used to run Facebook. 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.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the
source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in
public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated
powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to
initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and
democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is
‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states,
cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor
stated that “There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber
‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of
such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with
their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of
“Year Zero” goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The
disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic
perspective.”
Wikileaks 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.
Wikileaks has also decided to redact and
anonymise some identifying information in “Year Zero” for in depth analysis.
These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines
throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of
the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our
publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in “Vault 7”
part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published
over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.
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