Enlarge / The old headquarters building of the CIA in McLean, Virginia. A cache of files from CIA’s Langley, Virginia, cyber-intelligence center has apparently been obtained by Wikileaks.
This morning, WikiLeaks posted the first of what the organization’s spokesperson says is a multi-part series of documents and files from the Central Intelligence 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 [sic],” WikiLeaks’ spokesperson said in a press release.
The documents, many of them incomplete or redacted, appear to be pulled in part from an internal Wiki, while others appear to have been part of a user file directory. In a move unusual for WikiLeaks, individuals’ names have been redacted and replaced with unique identifiers. “These redactions include tens of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States,” WikiLeaks’ spokesperson explained in the release. “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 already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.”
The documents include instructions for using hacking tools, tips on configuration of Microsoft Visual Studio (classified as Secret/NOFORN), and testing notes for various hacking tools. Among the hacking tools listed are those for iOS, a collection of Android zero-days, and hacking techniques from various sources, including the UK’s GCHQ and the National Security Agency. These tools, WikiLeaks claimed, “permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo, Confide, and Cloackman by hacking the ‘smart’ phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.” That doesn’t mean the CIA has broken encryption on those tools—WikiLeaks’ claim is based on their ability to “root” those devices.