Enlarge / The logo of the CIA’s Engineering Development Group (EDG), the home of the spy agency’s malware and espionage tool developers.
There are thousands of files in WikiLeaks’ dump of data from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Engineering Development Group (EDG). This organization within the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence is responsible for creating the tools used to hack into digital devices around the world in support of the CIA’s mission. The leaked documents come from an Atlassian Confluence server used by the EDG’s developers to track and document their projects.
Many of the documents in the dump are unclassified—manuals provided by Lockheed Martin and other vendors, for example. Most are classified at the Secret level, including things as innocuous as a guide to getting started with Microsoft Visual Studio, apparently the preferred development tool of the EDG’s Applied Engineering Department (AED). There’s also a smattering of meme construction components and animated GIFs of the anime series Trigun.
But a tiny fraction of the data is highly classified, according to document marks. This cache sits at the Top Secret level, and it’s marked as “Special Intelligence” (SI) and “NOFORN” (no foreign distribution). Out of the first batch of just over 1000 documents, there are two paragraphs marked at that level. And those pieces describe minutiae of how CIA’s Network Operations Division wants the cryptographic features of its tools to work and how CIA obtains and prepares phones for use in its exploit lab.