WikiLeaks has published what it calls as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the “malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation” it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.
A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first part in a series of leaks on the agency that the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’
The documents 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.
“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 cyber peace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective,” WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said in a statement.
According to the statement, ‘CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” included “weaponised exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones,” RT.com reported.
“The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert CIA server,” WikiLeaks said.
The documents revealed that CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) has developed multiple tools and systems to hack popular smart phones and remotely order them to send both location data as well as audio and text communications.
Such tools allowed the secret agency to hack social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman before encryption can be applied, WikiLeaks claimed.
WikiLeaks was vague about the source. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” the organisation said.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden took to Twitter to say that the document seemed genuine and that only an insider could detail the process.
