Wikileaks has released this Tuesday more than 8,000 documents that reveal some valuable secrets from the United States Central Investigation Agency (CIA).
The announced was made by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, who said that those files are “the most comprehensive release of U.S. spying documents ever,” according to NBC News.
All this information was obtained from an “isolated, high-security network” in Langley, Virginia, according to Wikileaks press release that can be found on its website. Wikileaks says that the collection, named “Vault 7”, is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
The revealed documents want to demonstrate how significant are the hacking capabilities of the CIA. It is important to know that the hacking division of the American agency had more than 5,000 users and produced a lot of viruses and malware, according to the Wikileaks’s press release.
CIA can hear us by our phones
One of the most shocking “secrets” that has been revealed in these documents is the fact that the CIA could be able to use smart televisions as listening devices. Also, they could beat down the encryption of communications platforms like WhatsApp or even Signal, which seems to be the most secure communication app.
This hacking project had the capacity to operate systems of iPhones and Android phones, even Microsoft Windows phones to use them as microphones. Also, the popular Smart TV from Samsung could be transformed into spy tools, and the CIA could record conversations even when the TV is off.
All these technologies were developed by the CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) which works in the possibility of remotely hack and control smartphones like the popular iPhone or Android Operating System devices. Wikileaks said that the “infected” devices could have the capacity to send the CIA information like the user’s location, text communications, audio, and they also could activate the phone’s camera and microphone anytime they need it, being undetectable for the phone’s user.
Also, those documents demonstrate that the CIA counts with a specialized unit that develops different kinds of malware to infest and control not only iPhones but all the Apple products that use iOS, such as iPads or iPods.
“The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites,” says WikiLeaks.
Also, in July 2016, it was published that there are already more than 1 million iPhones in the world, which represents a lot of users.
But our phones are not the only ones
The “Vault 7” documents continue demonstrating the “hacking power” of the famous Agency and show that they also run efforts to infect the Microsoft Windows devices to control them too. Those efforts may include jumping viruses wich infects software distributed by CDs, DVDs, and USBs.
Other Operating Systems are not safe either since the CIA has developed, according to this revelations, other malware to control not only Windows but also Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and much more. It seems like they are trying to cover all the possibilities with this hacking platforms.
On the Wikileaks website, they say that the “part one” of Vault 7 was obtained in 2016, but that they will give more details at the time of its publication. So, it means that they will publish all those 8,000 documents obtained from the CIA records, but they don’t say when it will happen.
More about Wikileaks and its work
Wikileaks was founded by Julian Assange in 2006, and he shows it as a “media organization” and “associated library,” according to its website.
Wikileaks is known for publishing reports and filtered documents with content that they call “of public interest.” Since 2006, the Wikileaks database has grown up a lot, and now they have approximately 1,2 millions of documents with sensitive information.
In November 2010, Wikileaks published more than 250,000 documents with communications between the U.S. Department of State and U.S. embassies around the world with the famous name “Cablegate, famous” and it represented the biggest secret documents filtration in history. This information was given to prominent newspapers around the world like The New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais, etc.
Its creator, Julian Assange, won the Amnesty International’s prize in 2009 for announcing to the world the extrajudicial murderers in Kenia. Also, in 2008, he won the Index on Censorship Prize of The Economist magazine.
Assange said once that he has published more classified documents that all the world press together.
With those new revelations, Wikileaks shows that they continue on the news scope and that they will go on with the job of disclosing more sensitive information and classified documents from authorities like the United States CIA.
Source: WikiLeaks Vault 7