Entire Population of Langley, Virginia Face-palms as CIA Cyber Arsenal Leaks by
Our Great Nation seems to be in the midst of a bull market, a surplus, an astounding surfeit… yea verily a gilded age… of D’OH!
According to several major news outlets, WikiLeaks published thousands of docs from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence on Tuesday. Code-named “Vault 7”, Mssr. Assange and friends called it the “largest ever” cache of information it has grabbed from the Agency.
The leaks include several thousand trojans, viruses, and ‘weaponized’ malware — several hundred million lines of code — and if WL is to be believed, this haul represents the majority, if not the entirety, of the CIA’s hacking arsenal. Your humble Verodin blogger suspects that this might be a tad hyperbolic, but still, WTF.
No one’s been able to authenticate the code or the documents yet; experts expect that more information will arrive as soon as Lizard Squad, LulzSec, and Level Seven hackers recover from their post-celebratory hangovers. Some of the code reportedly taps into iPhones, Android devices, Microsoft Windows (wow!) and Samsung TVs, which can be turned into covert microphones, according to Captain Obvious, Wikileaks’ senior hacking correspondent.
What’s Verodin’s take? Well, in general, I’d say we’re pissed off at the security status-quo: the assumptions and “best practices” that take the place of actually field-testing (ie, attack-testing) production networks, thus gathering empirical data about their actual resilience. But reckless disclosures like this one don’t make anyone safer or “more free.”
There are examples of times when Wikileaks has acted in the public interest. But this isn’t one of them.
By now, we all understand that the digital devices that surround us are routinely used for surveillance and espionage operations. This is not a shocker. We also understand that there are a sh*t-ton of nuclear weapons in the world, and the apocalyptic consequences we face should they ever (God forbid) be used again. Publishing detailed recipes for how to create weapons of mass destruction – even digital ones – is stupid, deplorable and just plain irresponsible.
Shame on you, Julian.
- Malicious File Transfer: What You Need To Know About an Attacker’s Methods and Techniques To Protect Your Organization From Malware by Ursula Cowan
- Verodin LATAM Party (Porto Alegre Brazil) by Brian Contos
- Policy Evasion: Evasive Techniques You Need to Understand to Prevent Breaches and Attacks by Major General Earl Matthews USAF (Ret)
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Verodin Blog authored by Verodin Blog. Read the original post at: https://www.verodin.com/post/entire-population-of-langley-virginia-face-palms-as-cia-cyber-arsenal-leaks
