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NY Times, Mar. 8 2017
WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents
By SCOTT SHANE, MATTHEW ROSENBERG and ANDREW W. LEHREN
WASHINGTON — In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents
in history, WikiLeaks released on Tuesday thousands of pages describing
sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break
into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.
The documents amount to a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools.
They include instructions for compromising a wide range of common
computer tools for use in spying: the online calling service Skype;
Wi-Fi networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus
programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their computers.
A program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted
computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the
autocomplete function on Internet Explorer. Other programs were called
CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget.
The document dump was the latest coup for the antisecrecy organization
and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which uses its hacking abilities to
carry out espionage against foreign targets.
The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first installment
in a larger collection of secret C.I.A. material, included 7,818 web
pages with 943 attachments, many of them partly redacted by WikiLeaks
editors to avoid disclosing the actual code for cyberweapons. The entire
archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of
computer code, the group claimed.
In one revelation that may especially trouble the tech world if
confirmed, WikiLeaks said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence
services have managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones,
allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services
such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks,
government hackers can penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and
message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Unlike the National Security Agency documents Edward J. Snowden gave to
journalists in 2013, they do not include examples of how the tools have
been used against actual foreign targets. That could limit the damage of
the leak to national security. But the breach was highly embarrassing
for an agency that depends on secrecy.
Robert M. Chesney, a specialist in national security law at the
University of Texas at Austin, likened the C.I.A. trove to National
Security Agency hacking tools disclosed last year by a group calling
itself the Shadow Brokers.
“If this is true, it says that N.S.A. isn’t the only one with an
advanced, persistent problem with operational security for these tools,”
Mr. Chesney said. “We’re getting bit time and again.”
There was no public confirmation of the authenticity of the documents,
which were produced by the C.I.A.’s Center for Cyber Intelligence and
are mostly dated from 2013 to 2016. But one government official said the
documents were real, and a former intelligence officer said some of the
code names for C.I.A. programs, an organization chart and the
description of a C.I.A. hacking base appeared to be genuine.
The agency appeared to be taken by surprise by the document dump on
Tuesday morning. A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, “We do not comment
on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”
In some regard, the C.I.A. documents confirmed and filled in the details
on abilities that have long been suspected in technical circles.
“The people who know a lot about security and hacking assumed that the
C.I.A. was at least investing in these capabilities, and if they
weren’t, then somebody else was — China, Iran, Russia, as well as a lot
of other private actors,” said Beau Woods, the deputy director of the
Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He
said the disclosures may raise concerns in the United States and abroad
about “the trustworthiness of technology where cybersecurity can impact
human life and public safety.”
There is no evidence that the C.I.A. hacking tools have been used
against Americans. But Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil
Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said the
documents suggest that the government has deliberately allowed
vulnerabilities in phones and other devices to persist to make spying
easier.
“Those vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security
agencies, but by hackers and governments around the world,” Mr. Wizner
said. “Patching security holes immediately, not stockpiling them, is the
best way to make everyone’s digital life safer.”
WikiLeaks did not identify the source of the documents, which it called
Vault 7, but said they had been “circulated among former U.S. government
hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has
provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”
WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that
“urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s
hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of
public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to
initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use,
proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
But James Lewis, an expert on cybersecurity at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington, raised another possibility:
that a foreign state, most likely Russia, stole the documents by hacking
or other means and delivered them to WikiLeaks, which may not know how
they were obtained. Mr. Lewis noted that, according to American
intelligence agencies, Russia hacked Democratic targets during the
presidential campaign and gave thousands of emails to WikiLeaks for
publication.
“I think a foreign power is much more likely the source of these
documents than a conscience-stricken C.I.A. whistle-blower,” Mr. Lewis said.
At a time of increasing concern about the privacy of calls and messages,
the revelations did not suggest that the C.I.A. can actually break the
encryption used by popular messaging apps. Instead, by penetrating the
user’s phone, the agency can make the encryption irrelevant by
intercepting messages and calls before their content is encrypted, or,
on the other end, after messages are decrypted.
WikiLeaks, which has sometimes been accused of recklessly leaking
information that could do harm, said it had redacted names and other
identifying information from the collection. It said it was not
releasing the computer code for actual, usable weapons “until a
consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s
program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”
The codes names used for projects revealed in the WikiLeaks documents
appear to reflect the likely demographic of the cyberexperts employed by
the C.I.A. — that is, young and male. There are numerous references to
“Harry Potter,” Pokémon and Adderall, the drug used to treat hyperactivity.
A number of projects were named after whiskey brands. Some were high-end
single malt scotches, such as Laphroaig and Ardbeg. Others were from
more pedestrian labels, such as Wild Turkey, which was described by its
programmers, in mock dictionary style, as “(n.) A animal of the avian
variety that has not been domesticated. Also a type of alcohol with a
high proof (151).”
Some of the details of the C.I.A. programs might have come from the plot
of a spy novel for the cyberage, revealing numerous highly classified —
and, in some cases, exotic — hacking programs. One program, code-named
Weeping Angel, uses Samsung “smart” televisions as covert listening
devices. According to the WikiLeaks news release, even when it appears
to be turned off, the television “operates as a bug, recording
conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert
C.I.A. server.”
The release said the program was developed in cooperation with British
intelligence.
If C.I.A. agents did manage to hack the smart TVs, they would not be the
only ones. Since their release, internet-connected televisions have been
a focus for hackers and cybersecurity experts, many of whom see the
sets’ ability to record and transmit conversations as a potentially
dangerous vulnerability.
In early 2015, Samsung started to include in the fine print terms of
service for its smart TVs a warning that the television sets could
capture background conversations. “Please be aware that if your spoken
words include personal or other sensitive information, that information
will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through
your use of Voice Recognition,” the warning said.
Another program described in the documents, named Umbrage, is a
voluminous library of cyberattack techniques that the C.I.A. has
collected from malware produced by other countries, including Russia.
According to the WikiLeaks release, the large number of techniques
allows the C.I.A. to mask the origin of some of its attacks and confuse
forensic investigators.
The WikiLeaks material includes lists of software tools that the C.I.A.
uses to create exploits and malware to carrying out hacking. Many of the
tools are those used by developers around the world: coding languages,
such as Python, and tools like Sublime Text, a program used to write
code, and Git, a tool that helps developers collaborate.
But the agency also appears to rely on software designed specifically
for spies, such as Ghidra, which in one of the documents is described as
“a reverse engineering environment created by the N.S.A.”
The Vault 7 release marks the latest in a series of huge leaks that have
changed the landscape for government and corporate secrecy.
In scale, the Vault 7 archive appears to fall into the same category as
the biggest leaks of classified information in recent years, including
the quarter-million diplomatic cables taken by Chelsea Manning, the
former Army intelligence analyst, and given to WikiLeaks in 2010, and
the hundreds of thousands of National Security Agency documents taken by
Mr. Snowden in 2013.
In the business world, the so-called Panama Papers and several other
large-volume leaks have laid bare the details of secret offshore
companies used by wealthy and corrupt people to hide their assets.
Both government and corporate leaks have been made possible by the ease
of downloading, storing and transferring millions of documents in
seconds or minutes, a sea change from the use of slow photocopying for
some earlier leaks, including the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Follow Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter at @AllMattNYT
Scott Shane and Matthew Rosenberg reported from Washington, and Andrew
W. Lehren from New York. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.
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