CIA lost control of its hacking tools - Wikileaks Vault7

[Joel]

[Silver]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-0 ... am-eastern

From the article/comments below:

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.

More Irrefutable FACT on the ongoing Internal Deep State War the World is witnessing between the Black Hats Vs, the White Hats in the Trump Administration.

The Pure Evil Criminal Psychopaths at the CIA have created a Mirror NSA entity of its own to unleash havoc among its adversaries. Unaccountable to no one.

The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question about the CIA's future in the US.

Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long, that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes Against The American People.

[Joel]

Thanks for sharing



remembering Michael Hastings

[Joel]

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever batch of confidential documents on the CIA, revealing the breadth of the agency’s ability to hack smartphones and popular social media messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The agency can hide the fingerprints from its hacking exploits and attribute blame to others, such as Russia and China. Former Pentagon official Michael Maloof joins RT America's Alex Mihailovich to discuss.

[Joel]

Wikileaks Vault 7: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden blames millennials for highly sensitive CIA data leaks:

"This group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39201957

[Joel]

[Joel]

How about now?

[Joel]

[Joel]

WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA agents were given cover identities and diplomatic passports to enter the country. The base was used to develop hacking tools as part of the CIA's massive digital arsenal.

The leaks purportedly revealed that a top secret CIA unit used the German city of Frankfurt am Main as the starting point for numerous hacking attacks on Europe, China and the Middle East.

Frankfurt base

WikiLeaks reported that the group developed trojans and other malicious software in the American Consulate General Office, the largest US consulate in the world. The programs focused on targets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The documents revealed that CIA experts worked in the building under cover and included advice for life in Germany.

"Do not leave anything electronic or sensitive unattended in your room," it told employees, also advising them to enjoy Lufthansa's free alcohol "in moderation."

The Frankfurt hackers, part of the Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe, were said to be given diplomatic passports and a State Department identity. It instructed employees how to safely enter Germany. A WikiLeaks tweet published an section of the Frankfurt information.

[Joel]

[Joel]

[Joel]

WikiLeaks: We'll work with tech firms to defeat CIA hacking

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his group will work with technology companies to help defend them against the Central Intelligence Agency's hacking tools.

In an online press conference, Assange acknowledged that companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published Tuesday.

Assange said Thursday that "we have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out."

The CIA has so far declined to comment on the authenticity of the leak.

[Joel]

Julian Assange holds News Conference on CIA Leaks, Samsung and Devices Spying on people

[Separatist]

How about now?

Let's Hear It for More White House Leaks
http://www.garynorth.com/public/16297.cfm

The White House is leaking like a sieve. Why should conservatives worry about this?

The federal government does everything it can to increase the secrecy of its operations. It invades our privacy, but it whines when any of the rest of us invade the privacy of government bureaucrats.

I am all in favor of WikiLeaks. I think WikiLeaks should be nonpartisan. I think it should expose anything that does not directly affect national security. In any case, the main thing that affects national security is America's meddling in other nations' affairs. We could reduce the threat of attacks on the United States by reducing American meddling in foreign nations' affairs.

President Trump has complained about the number of leaks. This is good news. He seems unable to stop the leaks.

Leaks undermine the Presidency. That was why I was in favor of them during Obama's administration. He was a master at controlling leaks. So was George W. Bush. That was bad for the American public generally. We needed more leaks regarding what both administrations were planning for America. We lost the war in Iraq, and we are losing the war in Afghanistan precisely because Bush was able to control the leaks associated with the unnecessary and illegal invasions of both nations. Congress went along with both invasions. But Congress, as always, did not follow the Constitution and declare war against these nations. It has not declared war against a nation since the declaration of war against Germany on December 11, 1941. Germany had already declared war on the United States.

The government loves to use this phrase: "Honest people have nothing to worry about when the government invades their privacy." I think it is time for Americans to adopt the same response: "An honest President's administration has nothing to fear from leaks."

The existence of these leaks testifies to the fact that the American deep state is secretly monitoring the telephone calls of high American officials. This is a good thing. High American officials should get used to it. They don't care when the deep state monitors the general public, so why should the general public care when the deep state monitors high-level officials in Washington?

This is called turnabout. Turnabout is fair play.

The American elite delights in the fact that the government invades the privacy of American citizens. The elite pushes us around, and it has a great time doing it. Why should we care if the White House is embarrassed by various forms of skullduggery committed by senior members of the White House? This keeps the White House on the defensive. Anything that keeps any branch of government on the defensive is positive.

Every time that the NSA or the CIA places a bug on the telephone of a White House official, the time involved and the money involved are being put to good use. The time and money are not being applied to monitoring private citizens, whose lives have been invaded by the deep state since 1946.

I think members of the White House staff should live in constant fear of being monitored. That would be positive. They deserve the same degree of fear and outrage that the rest of us suffer. Why let them off the hook?

The American media delight in exposing the foibles of White House officials. This is all to the good. I think this tradition is going to be maintained during the Presidency of whoever follows Trump. It is something of a media precedent. All of it undermines the Presidency. Why should this bother conservatives?

The media over the next four years will become addicted to a flow of leaked information. Addictions are difficult to break. Precedents are being set. Leakers are getting away with what used to be regarded as murder. The more that the media have exposed the chicanery of Presidents and their staffs, the better it has been for liberty in general.

It was a great thing that Nixon was driven out of office. I thought so at the time. This was a check on the expansion of federal power. It benefited Democrats in Congress, but it is better to strengthen Congress in relationship to the Presidency than the other way around. Voters have some minimal degree of control over what Congress does. Voters have no control over what a President does in between elections.

The mainstream media will find it difficult to reverse course after the next President is inaugurated. There will always be hotshot reporters who get tipped off. Editors who are using leaks to increase readership today will find it difficult to stop this tactic when a new President comes into power. We saw this under Nixon. The leaking of the Pentagon papers was basic to American journalism. It broke the taboo. Daniel Ellsberg did not go to jail. That was a good thing.

I regard leaks as an extension of the Freedom of Information Act. The more leaks there are, the better it is for liberty.

The more fearful that the White House is about leaks, the less likely that the White House will be able to sneak some program or policy by the American people. Trump should be open about his goals. He should pursue them openly. He should tell his supporters what he is doing, and then he should do it. He should not wait for a leak to reveal what he is planning to do. Instead of getting caught, he should get tough. His supporters will appreciate this.

The real action is with the Federal Register. Nobody ever talks about the Federal Register. Bureaucracies crank out 80,000 pages a year of regulations. Rarely are regulations repealed. With or without ObamaCare, American liberty is going to shrink by 80,000 pages this year. Regulation by regulation, our freedom of action is constrained.

What we need is leaks from every federal bureaucracy. We need greater exposure of these invisible people. We need them to live in fear of exposure. The trouble is, nobody is interested in what the federal government's bureaucracy does on a day-to-day basis. That is a great benefit to the bureaucrats.

I end with my favorite scene in one of my favorite movies, Absence of Malice (1981). A senior federal official is investigating a series of newspaper stories on what was going on inside a federal investigation unit. The unit was involved in a series of illegal activities against an innocent private citizen, played by Paul Newman. Newman designs a retaliation scheme based on what he knew would happen. The media exposed private information on him. He had set a booby trap for the Feds. It exploded.

[Joel]

[Joel]

Once again, the tinfoil hats were wrong: reality is way worse than they claimed

With WikiLeaks’ release of the CIA hacking tools, we can observe that the people described as tinfoil hats were wrong once again – nobody had described the state of affairs as bad enough. If somebody had told you that the CIA can turn on your TV while making it look like it’s still off, the statement would have been thoroughly discarded as a thing of Orwellian Telescreens. What else is our governments doing that is just so audacious we just would never believe it?

The CIA’s hacking arsenal, or a majority of it, has been published by Wikileaks: the world is again stunned with just how much power governments are giving themselves to violate privacy and other civil liberties. It turns out that the CIA has more power than the NSA, which itself was the target of gasps a few years ago as Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

In addition, it would appear that the CIA’s mass surveillance operations have been almost completely devoid of any checks and balances – where such exist for the NSA at least in theory (and are ignored).

A bullet point list with just a short summary of what Wikileaks reveals includes the following:

The CIA has deliberately “inserted”, whatever that means in detail, its own coders into all major US tech manufacturers. (This is not unlike the US accuses China of doing – with Huawei routers being a prime example.)

More to the point, the CIA is alleged to have turned every Windows PC into a potential remote spy tool, with the ability to activate backdoors on demand, including via Windows Update. (This has – or should have – diplomatic implications: any government that doesn’t like a foreign power having remote switches into its administration should have migrated from Windows when this ability was even suspected.)

A lot of people have already mentioned the CIA’s ability to turn a Samsung SmartTV into an Orwellian Telescreen, recording everything said in the room while giving the appearance to be off. To be fair, though, this appears to require physical access to the TV unit – presumably in order to flash the firmware with something hostile – and if you have physical access to the location, you might as well plant a low-tech 1950s-era bug doing the exact same thing.

Notably, the bullet point list includes “… had a huge amount of weaponized malware … and lost control of it”. This is what security experts have said for years, if not decades: everything eventually leaks and you have to design your operations around that fact of life, as if it were a fact of life, for it very much appears to be.

Once again, the world’s most powerful country shows that it can’t even keep its dirtiest laundry under wraps. What makes anybody think that their personal data is better protected? Especially when it’s supposed to be protected by said superpower which can’t even protect its own worst secrets?

More shockingly, this transgression doesn’t stop at violating privacy – it even includes violating the right to life, less academically expressed as “murders and assassinations”: The CIA has access to remote control of medical devices and hospital technology, which it could conceivably use for things like stopping a pacemaker remotely.

Finally, all these revelations – which will takes weeks to analyze – is said to be the first part of the leak.

Your privacy remains your own responsibility. No superpower is going to protect it for you. In fact, they’re already doing the exact opposite and failing to protect their own privacy about it.

[gruden2.0]

If you remember Stuxnet from a few years back, which was likely a CIA/Mosad joint venture, it took advantage of four zero-day vulnerabilities. Most viruses, by comparison, are written for a single zero-day vulnerability as it takes a lot of effort to find them, but even a single one is dangerous by itself. If intelligence agencies know about them and use them, that leaves them open for hackers to find and exploit. And they will find them, only a matter of time. That makes the internet all that much more dangerous for the rest of us.

[HorribleUsername]

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I appreciate the OP, Joel. Thank you.

[Joel]

You're Welcome!

[tribrac]

The tepid response by the media is understandable, but I am shocked and saddened by the seemingly lack of outrage by the millennials.

I spoke with a young millennial friend who wanted to blast republicans for a variety of issues, including Trump for "making up spying stories". I pointed out wikileaks was showing the CIA is watching us, just as Snowden said, I asked my friend if that disturbed him.

"No, why should it bother me, I'm not doing anything wrong"

He accepted the CIA spying on everyone, believing he was safe because his views aligned with the CIA since the CIA was out to get Trump.

Or in other words, Trump is bad, so if the CIA is after Trump, then the CIA is good. So welcome to the new morality where nothing is based on any morality, sound reasoning or logic. What ever position trump takes the M's will feel justified in taking the other.

[Joel]

[Joel]

On tonight’s Big Picture, Thom talks to former CIA analyst and whistleblower John Kiriakou and journalist James Bamford about the recent Wikileaks dump, known as “Vault 7” and what it reveals about hacking and surveillance techniques used by the CIA.

[Joel]

The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald discusses Wikileaks recent release of CIA surveillance programs and the investigations into Russia's role in the US election with CNN's Michael Smerconish.

[Joel]

WikiLeaks’ Release Sheds Some Light on Supposed Russian Hacks

“The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a ‘fingerprint’ that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity."

While the CIA scrambles to defend themselves and the FBI hunts out the likely candidate responsible for the WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 leak – a trove of CIA documents highlighting the intelligence agency’s ability to hack and spy – an important piece of the puzzle remains largely ignored.

The still yet to be proven theory of ‘The Russians Did It’ hack involving the US elections last year now drowns in murky waters. Whether the Russians were responsible for interfering with the election process last year or not, the Vault 7 leak inhibits any further debate.

The CIA had all the necessary tools to style the Russians as appearing to have interfered, and this is vital to the debate. The CIA has now been revealed as having the ability to cloak itself as another country, leaving behind ‘fingerprints’ to confuse investigators. The agency’s deceptive qualities are substantial, and techniques used are probable “techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.”

The CIA’s UMBRAGE group, according to WikiLeaks, is responsible for “maintaining [the] substantial library of attack techniques”:

“The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a ‘fingerprint’ that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.

“This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.”

With this context now in the public arena, disproving any detection of electronic markings by the Russian government as those left by the CIA becomes extremely difficult, if not unlikely.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from,” WikiLeaks states in its release.

“UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”

The Codex document, also a part of the Vault 7 release sheds further light on the “important aspect” of the “system fingerprint” and how it can be utilised.

Although the CIA has said little on the authenticity of the released documents, they have defended their work. Ryan Trapani, a spokesman for the CIA stated WikiLeaks has “equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm,” further saying the CIA is prohibited legally to spy on individuals in the US.



However, only weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept pointed out during an interview with Democracy Now, [mark 2:36] that CIA spying of this nature permits spying on any individual in the United States who speaks with individuals outside the nation whom the agency is interested in.

The hacking tools and CIA’s ability, although don’t prove the CIA planted evidence to incriminate the Russian Federation in the form of these ‘fingerprints’, does water down The Russians Did It argument. The significance of this release is only starting to be recognized.

Watch as the agencies scramble to contain the damage now.

[Joel]