What is Vault 7? It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie or the Fallout video games series, but it is not! It is a real thing from the CIA that WikiLeaks has sunk its teeth into. Released “Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named 'Vault 7' by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.”
It is described by some to be bigger and potentially more groundbreaking than the Snowden leaks. According to the official WikiLeaks Press Release the first part of the series contains “8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina,” and that is just round one. In theory, WikiLeaks will be releasing document dumps of similar size annually for the foreseeable future and some people have suggested that the entirety of Vault 7 once released will be bigger and more earth shattering that the Snowden leaks.
So what is in these documents? No one really knows. 8,761 is a big number and WikiLeaks has asked for the help of journalists to sift through the search volume.
But we have learned a few key things. First off: SURPRISE the CIA has hackers. Okay, so that doesn't really surprise anyone, but what is interesting is the sheer scale of its operation.
“By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.”
That's right! One division of the CIA uses more code than Facebook. Which if you were unaware is a lot.
You may have also noticed the “5000 registered users.” No, it is not a secret social media site for secret agents. Those 5000 refer to the “Moral Hackers” the CIA has a network with. Moral Hackers are people who the CIA employs to find weaknesses in pretty much everything. So if you work for the CIA’s Directorate for Digital Innovation you may get asked to find a weakness in, say, the iPhone 7’s security. You find the weakness and you report it to your superiors. As a result, the CIA has a Library of Alexandria worth of ways to break into pretty much every electronic device on the planet, especially iPhone, Android and smart TVs.
Legally the CIA is allowed to do this under the assumption that the Agency will communicate these weaknesses to the manufacturer so that companies like Apple and Samsung can better protect their customers.
What Vault 7 seems to be suggesting is that the CIA is not doing that. Instead, keeping the knowledge of the weaknesses secret so they can exploit them. It is using your TV as a microphone or reading texts from encoded apps.
“The CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.”
Remember that Library of Alexandria worth of information on hacking? Someone, maybe multiple someones, has the collective capacity of the CIA’s hacking division with none of the CIA’s oversight.
So, what can you do? Stay informed and don’t do stupid stuff online. It is going to be years before we know everything about Vault 7 so take a deep breath and remember this is going to be a crazy couple of years.
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