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With WikiLeaks Claims of C.I.A. Hacking, How Vulnerable Is Your Smartphone?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: March 13th, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/technology/cia-hacking-do...
WikiLeaks on Tuesday released a significant cache of documents that it said came from a high-security network inside the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks called the documents Vault 7, and they lay out the capabilities of the agencys global covert hacking program. By the end of 2016, the C.I.A. program had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors, [and] had produced more than a thousand hacking systems. The files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive, WikiLeaks said. The software targeted by the hacking program included the most popular smartphone operating systems. Apples iPhone software ... was a particular target, including the development of several zero day exploits - a term for attacking coding flaws the company would not have known about. Googles Android ... received even more attention. By 2016, the C.I.A. had 24 weaponized Android zero day software programs. The C.I.A. also targeted ... internet-connected computers and home and industrial devices running the Linux operating system. In 2010, the Obama administration promised to disclose newly discovered vulnerabilities to companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. But the WikiLeaks documents indicate that the agency found security flaws, kept them secret and then used them for surveillance and intelligence gathering.
Note: See the wikileaks webpage summarizing this most important leak. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
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