A lot of leaks coming from CIA top secrets files have been revelaed from WikiLeaks.
The Central Intelligence Agency or shortly, CIA is one of the most important agencies in the US such as NSA, and its main role is to get and gather information about the national security.
Since from the beginning all of us thought that such companies used not-so-much legal methods to obtain such information about us, broking our privacy rights.
In the history of these secret agencies, we have already seen events where ex employees revealed some confidential documents.
We can think to Edwar Snowden, who revealed to the press all the NSA security programs and to not being arrested it had to far away in Island.
Some days ago, something similar happened, but much more serious.
WikiLeaks has published 8,761 internal documents on the CIA’s hacking programme. According to the organisation, this leak is just the first part of its new series on the US Central Intelligence Agency: WikiLeaks could have tens of thousands of files and even Cia cyberweapons.
Till now all the CIA capabilities were unknown, but what has been found in this documents has revealed all about CIA high developed technology.
In particular, it has shown that CIA was spying people using a sort of virus that was loaded in almost all kind of tech devices such as mobiles, laptops and TVs too.
We are not joking, all these agencies are controlling us 24h per day, even our private conversations and even if you are not the US president.
They have all the backdoors (ways) to hack your smartphone, whatever OS it has in it. Android, iOS, windows phone, CIA can have the control on everything.
Julian Assange, one of WikiLeaks director has decided to publish these documents, while at the same time avoiding “the distribution of ‘armed’ cyberweapons, until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the Cia program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published”, because “once a single cyber weapon is lost it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike”.
WikiLeaks claims that the source for these documents made a statement to the organisation, explaining his reason for providing these files: “The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons”.
And we agree with him.
Yes, tons of files about how was CIA tech was working has been published, so you can think that hacks would increase but, finally we have a proof that we are controlled, definetely.
What has been found in those top secret files?
Till now we didn’t know what was going on in CIA and we couldn’t look inside the software develpment group of the Central Intelligence Agency. Documents allow understanding how on the top there is the so-called “Engineering Development Group” (EDG), which has branches like the Embedded Development Branch (EDB), the Operations Support Branch (OSB), the Remote Device Branch (RDB) and many more, each of them with its own projects and mission.
The EDB’s mission, for example, is “To be the premiere development shop for customized hardware and software solutions for Information Operations”. By utilizing operating system knowledge, hardware design, software craftsmanship, and network expertise, EDB develops software and hardware solutions “to support the “Information Operations Center” mission.
Last year, speaking to the US Senate the head of the US intelligence community, James Clapper, declared: “In the future, intelligence services might use (the internet of things) for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking”. Clapper was certainly not an oracle predicting the future: according to the WikiLeaks’ files, the CIA has been able since 2014 to implant malware on on a well-known model of smart TV to capture conversations inside the room where the TV is connected to the Internet. The programme is called “Weeping Angel” and it was developed by the Embedded Development Branch in collaboration with the British intelligence services.
However, at least at the beginning Weeping Angel was not free from tricky challenges: “updating firmware over the internet”, the Agency writes in its documents, “may remove implant (not tested) or portions of it” and a blue LED on the back created headaches to the CIA, by remaining powered even when the TV appeared to be powered off: they call it Fake-off. That blue LED could reveal that something strange was going on inside the spied TV. According to the documents, the Agency’s tech people tried to address this problem in June 2014 in a joint workshop with the British intelligence agency MI5 and the Agency was ready to focus on new challenges: how to capture video and video snapshots from that smart TV.
Since 2015, concerns had emerged about smart TVs ability to spy: files published today by WikiLeaks appear to confirm those thoughts weren’t so wrong.
Smart TVs weren’t the only target. They also thought about old devices, or how they call “Pterodactyls”.
A programme called “Pterodactyl”, a curious name probably referring to a dinosaur technology like the floppy disk, and developed by the Embedded Development Branch has the stated goal “to provide the asset with the ability to rapidly copy 3.5” floppy disk in a covert manner. Among the requirements needed for this programme is the “obfuscation” requirement: “in order to conceal activities on the device as much as possible, the device should behave as normally as possible on the device filesystem”, writes the Agency’s branch.
Floppy disk technology is often dismissed as a relic of the 1980s with no relevant use, however last year a US government report allowed us to learn that they are still used to control the system that coordinates the operational functions of the US nuclear forces: from intercontinental ballistic missiles to nuclear bombers.
This is just a part of what their are able to.
What are their aims?
We don’t actually know if all this high tech software it’s used, may be to spy terrorist or may be just to be superior than other secret companies, it’s not a case that CIA got the control even on hacked files in Italy. They want to be updated about all.
All the docs we had, were “just” explaining their tech, but they weren’t technical posts with code.
Catching the culprit.
CIA is actually trying to discover who has been the culprit of this event, the people who gave the files to WikiLeaks since he/she hasn’t just given the docs but also the technical ones.
If we consider that 900,000 people have access to their top secret files, it would be really hard to them find the offender.
According to latest news, it may be one of the “millenials”, the youngest people in their team who want to revenge something.
Or according to the Senator McCain, 80 years old, it is “a tipycal russian move” since it has already happened that Assange (WikiLeaks) has worked with them.
It’s just a initial investigation, we’ll see what will be discovered in the next days.
Stay tuned with us!
