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.</s>WASHINGTON (AP) — WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to expose intimate details of America’s cyberespionage toolkit.

It was not immediately clear how WikiLeaks obtained the information, which included more than 8,700 documents and files. The CIA tools, if authentic, could undermine the confidence that consumers have in the safety and security of their computers, mobile devices and even smart TVs.

WikiLeaks said the material came from “an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.” It didn’t say how the files were removed, such as possibly by a rogue employee, by hacking a federal contractor working for the CIA or breaking into a staging server where such hacking tools might be temporarily stored.

The more than 8,000 documents cover a host of technical topics, including what appears to be a discussion about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices. WikiLeaks said the data also include details on the agency’s efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft Windows.

The information dump could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press, and the CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing top secret government documents. Experts who’ve started to sift through the material said that it appeared legitimate and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.

Jonathan Liu, a spokesman for the CIA, said: “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

WikiLeaks said the archive “appears to have 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.”

If the authenticity of the documents is officially confirmed, it would represent yet another catastrophic breach for the U.S. intelligence community at the hands of WikiLeaks and its allies, which have repeatedly humbled Washington with the mass release of classified material, including hundreds of thousands of documents from the State Department and the Pentagon.

WikiLeaks, which has been dropping cryptic hints about the release for a month, said in a lengthy statement that the CIA had “recently” lost control of a massive arsenal of CIA hacking tools as well as associated documentation.

“There’s no question that there’s a fire drill going on right now,” said Jake Williams, a security expert with Augusta, Georgia-based Rendition Infosec. “It wouldn’t surprise me that there are people changing careers — and ending careers — as we speak.”

One of the purported CIA malware programs is described in the WikiLeaks documents as a “simple DLL hijacking attempt” that had been tested against Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and 7 operating systems. The technique, which the document called a “Windows FAX DLL injection,” introduces computer code that allows an attacker to gain access to a computer process’ memory and permissions while at the same time masking the attack.

Williams, who has experience dealing with government hackers, said the voluminous files’ extensive references to operation security meant they were almost certainly government-backed. “I can’t fathom anyone fabricated that amount of operational security concern,” he said. “It rings true to me.”

“The only people who are having that conversation are people who are engaging in nation-state-level hacking,” he said.

WikiLeaks said its data also included a “substantial library” of digital espionage techniques borrowed from other countries, including Russia.

Bob Ayers, a retired U.S. intelligence official currently working as a security analyst, noted that WikiLeaks has promised to release more CIA documents.

“The damage right now is relatively high level,” he said. “The potential for really detailed damage will come in the following releases.”</s>WikiLeaks on Tuesday released a significant cache of documents that it said came from a high-security network inside the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks called the documents Vault 7, and they lay out the capabilities of the agency’s global covert hacking program.

What is the C.I.A. program?

By the end of 2016, the C.I.A. program had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors. And they had produced more than a thousand hacking systems. The agency’s arsenal, the documents indicate, included an array of malware ranging from viruses to clandestine “zero days” vulnerabilities in the software of major companies.

The files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in “an unauthorized manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” WikiLeaks said.

WikiLeaks said it was publishing the documents while redacting and anonymizing some passages, including the names of “tens of thousands” of C.I.A. targets. WikiLeaks said it was not distributing “armed cyberweapons.”</s>WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to provide an eye-opening look at the intimate details of America's cyberespionage toolkit. The dump could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press and the CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing top secret government documents.

Start the conversation, or Read more at The Post-Standard.</s>WASHINGTON: Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday published what it said were thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions about hacking techniques used over several years, renewing concerns about the security of consumer electronics and embarrassing yet another U.S. intelligence agency.

The discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple Inc iPhones, Google Inc Android devices and other gadgets in order to capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted with sophisticated software.

Cyber security experts disagreed about the extent of the fallout from the data dump, but said a lot would depend on whether WikiLeaks followed through on a threat to publish the actual hacking tools that could do damage.

Reuters could not immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.

A longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools told Reuters the documents included correct "cover" terms describing active cyber programs.

Among the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims is that the Central Intelligence Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.

The files did not indicate the actual encryption of Signal or other secure messaging apps had been compromised.

The information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments appears to represent the latest breach in recent years of classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Security experts differed over how much the disclosures could damage U.S. cyber espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 of mass NSA data collection.

"This is a big dump about extremely sophisticated tools that can be used to target individual user devices ... I haven’t yet come across the mass exploiting of mobile devices," said Tarah Wheeler, senior director of engineering and principal security advocate for Symantec.

Stuart McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm, said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers cover their tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting they are from Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.

Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.

In one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a programme known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was recording conversations in the room.

The CIA and White House declined comment. "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.

Google declined to comment on the purported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.

Snowden on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Apple Inc did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools like Signal.

Signal inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as "confirmation that what we’re doing is working." Signal and the like are "pushing intelligence agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks."

The CIA in recent years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries. The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.

The documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.

Unlike the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.

WikiLeaks, led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the CIA's "entire hacking capacity."

The documents only include snippets of computer code, not the full programs that would be needed to conduct cyber exploits.

WikiLeaks said it was refraining from disclosing usable code from CIA's cyber arsenal "until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s programme and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published."

U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia's security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence campaign to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidency.

Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign, often citing hacked emails it published to bolster his attacks on Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks said on Tuesday that the documents showed that the CIA hoarded serious security vulnerabilities rather than share them with the public, as called for under a process established by President Barack Obama.

Rob Knake, a former official who dealt with the issue under Obama, said he had not seen evidence in what was published to support that conclusion.

The process "is not a policy of unilateral disarmament in cyberspace. The mere fact that the CIA may have exploited zero-day vulnerabilities should not surprise anyone," said Knake, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.

In a press release, the group said, "The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive."

U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of security breaches, including Snowden's.

In 2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to Wikileaks.

Last month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of 20 years, storing the secrets in his home.</s>WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to provide an eye-opening look at the intimate details of America’s cyberespionage toolkit.

The dump of more than 8,000 documents could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press and the CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing top secret government documents. Experts who’ve started to sift through the material said it appeared legitimate – and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.

“There’s no question that there’s a fire drill going on right now,” said Jake Williams, a security expert with Augusta, Georgia-based Rendition Infosec. “It wouldn’t surprise me that there are people changing careers – and ending careers – as we speak.”

Bob Ayers, a retired U.S. intelligence official currently working as a security analyst, agreed, saying that the release was “real bad” for the agency.

If the authenticity of the dump were officially confirmed, it would represent yet another catastrophic breach for the U.S. intelligence community at the hands of WikiLeaks and its allies, which have repeatedly humbled Washington with the mass release of classified material, including hundreds of thousands of documents from the State Department and the Pentagon.

WikiLeaks, which had been dropping cryptic hints about the release for a month, said in a lengthy statement that the CIA had “recently” lost control of a massive arsenal of CIA hacking tools as well as associated documentation. The radical transparency organization said that “the archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner” and that one of them “provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

Jonathan Liu, a spokesman for the CIA, said: “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

Williams, who has experience dealing with government hackers, said that the voluminous files’ extensive references to operation security meant they were almost certainly government-backed.

“I can’t fathom anyone fabricated that amount of operational security concern,” he said. “It rings true to me.”

“The only people who are having that conversation are people who are engaging in nation-state-level hacking,” he said.

The documents cover a range of topics, including what appeared to be a discussion about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

WikiLeaks said the leaked data also included details on the agency’s efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows.

A “substantial library” of digital espionage techniques borrowed from Russia and other countries is in the data as well, WikiLeaks said.

Ayers noted that WikiLeaks has promised to release more CIA documents, saying Tuesday’s publication was just “the first full part of the series.”

“The damage right now is relatively high-level,” he said. “(But) the potential for really detailed damage will come in the following releases.”</s>The CIA can turn your TV into a listening device, bypass popular encryption apps, and possibly control your car, according to a trove of documents published by WikiLeaks Tuesday which it said came from the US spy agency.

WikiLeaks said the documents show that the Central Intelligence Agency is rivalling the National Security Agency, the US government’s main electronic spying body, in cyber warfare, but with less oversight.

The group posted nearly 9,000 documents it said came from the CIA, calling it the largest-ever publication of secret intelligence materials.

The CIA would neither confirm nor deny the documents were genuine, or comment on their content.

“We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents,” said spokesman Jonathan Liu in an email.

WikiLeaks claimed that a vast trove of CIA documents representing “the majority of its hacking arsenal” had been leaked within the cyber security community — and that it had received, and released, a part of them.

“This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA,” it said.

“The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

WikiLeaks said the documents show the CIA has produced more than 1,000 malware systems — viruses, trojans, and other software that can infiltrate and take control of target electronics.

These hacking tools have targeted iPhones, Android systems such as the personal phone reportedly still used by President Donald Trump, popular Microsoft software, and Samsung smart TVs, which can be transformed into covert microphones, according to WikiLeaks.

The agency has also examined hacking into the electronic control systems on cars and trucks, potentially making it able to control them.

By infecting smartphones, WikiLeaks said, the CIA can get around the encryption technologies of popular apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo, and Confide by collecting communications before they are encrypted.

WikiLeaks said the documents’ leak suggests that the CIA has not sufficiently controlled its own cyber weapons, potentially permitting them to fall into the hands of other hackers.

“Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA’s cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals,” WikiLeaks said.

In a statement, WikiLeaks founder and chief editor Julian Assange said that the documents show the “extreme risk” of the uncontrolled spread of cyber weapons.

“Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade,” he said.</s>WASHINGTON: Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday said it had obtained a secret trove of hacking tools used by the CIA to break into or circumvent the security of phones, communication apps and other devices, and published confidential documents describing those programs.

Among the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims are that the Central Intelligence Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, by hacking phones that use Google Inc's Android platform to collect audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.

Reuters could not immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.

The information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments appears to represent the latest in a string of breaches in recent years of classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Experts differed over how much the disclosures will damage U.S. cyber espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 of intrusive NSA surveillance.

Stuart McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm, said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers cover their tracks by leaving trails suggesting they are from Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.

Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.

In one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a program known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was recording conversations in the room.

"You thought your technology was safe. It's never been safe," said James Lewis, cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

The CIA and White House declined comment. "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.

Google declined to comment on the reported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.

Snowden on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

An Apple Inc spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

The documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools like Signal.

Signal inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as "confirmation that what we’re doing is working." Signal and the like are "pushing intelligence agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks."

The CIA in recent years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries. The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.

The documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.

Unlike the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.

WikiLeaks, led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the CIA's "entire hacking capacity."

The documents do not include actual computer code needed to conduct the cyber exploits they describe.

WikiLeaks said it published the CIA documents "while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyber weapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should be analyzed, disarmed and published."

U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia's security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence campaign to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.

In a press release, the group said, "The archive appears to have 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."

U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of major security breaches, including Snowden's.

In 2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to Wikileaks. President Barack Obama shortened her prison sentence in January.

Last month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of 20 years, storing the trove of secrets in his home.

A longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools said that people in the CIA and the NSA were "furious" about the apparent new breach. "This is not a Snowden-type situation," he said. "This was taken over a long term and handed over to WikiLeaks."</s>The CIA can turn your TV into a listening device, bypass popular encryption apps, and possibly control your car, according to a trove of alleged documents from the US spy agency released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.

The group posted nearly 9,000 documents it said were leaked from the Central Intelligence Agency, in what it described as the largest-ever publication of secret intelligence materials.

WikiLeaks claimed that a vast trove of CIA documents, hacking tools and code representing "the majority of its hacking arsenal" were leaked within the cyber security community — and that it had received, and released, a part of them.

"This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA," it said, warning of a risk of cyber weapons proliferation.

Neither the CIA nor the White House would say if the documents were genuine.

If corroborated, the leak could represent a huge new embarrassment to US intelligence, adding to Edward Snowden's 2013 expose of National Security Agency spying on Americans' communications, and the arrest last year of an NSA official for removing massive amounts of top-secret material to his home over 20 years.

WikiLeaks said the data shows that the CIA is now rivaling the NSA, the US government's main electronic spying body, in cyber warfare, but with less oversight.

The archive shows the CIA exploiting weaknesses it discovers in hardware and software systems, including those made by US companies — without letting anyone know about the flaws in question.

Documents show the CIA has produced more than 1,000 malware systems — viruses, trojans, and other software that can infiltrate and take control of personal electronics, WikiLeaks noted.

These hacking tools have targeted iPhones, Android systems such as the personal phone reportedly still used by President Donald Trump, popular Microsoft software, and Samsung smart TVs, which can be transformed into covert microphones, according to WikiLeaks.

The agency has also examined hacking into the electronic control systems on cars and trucks, potentially enabling it to control them remotely.

By infecting and effectively taking over the software of smartphones, WikiLeaks said, the CIA can get around the encryption technologies of popular apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo, and Confide by collecting communications before they are encrypted.

The CIA would neither confirm nor deny the documents were genuine.

"We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents," said spokesman Jonathan Liu in an email to AFP.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer declined to comment, saying "That's something that has not been fully evaluated."

But Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives's Intelligence Committee, said the disclosures "appear to be very, very serious."

"We are very concerned," he said.

The documents allegedly come from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, which operates both from its Langley, Virginia, headquarters near Washington, and from an office in the US consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, according to WikiLeaks.

"The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive," the group said.

Snowden, who was a contract employee for the NSA before he stole and leaked secret materials, said via Twitter that the document trove "looks authentic."

WikiLeaks said the documents' leak suggests that the CIA has not sufficiently controlled its own cyber weapons, potentially permitting them to fall into the hands of other hackers.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, blasted the CIA for not helping companies plug the security gaps in their devices.

"The dark side of this story is that the documents confirm that the CIA holds on to security vulnerabilities in software and devices — including Android phones, iPhones, and Samsung televisions — that millions of people around the world rely on," she said in a statement.

"As these leaks show, we're all made less safe by the CIA's decision to keep — rather than ensure the patching of — vulnerabilities."

The release showed WikiLeaks's readiness to continue publishing secret material on the United States despite having been severely criticized in Washington for last year's leaks of materials that damaged Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.

US intelligence officials said in January that WikiLeaks had knowingly or unknowingly become a tool of a high-level Russian operation to interfere in the US election with those disclosures.</s>The Central Intelligence Agency’s hackers have developed tools letting them break into devices from iPhones and Android phones to Samsung “smart” televisions to monitor conversations and messages, according to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, which specialises in disclosing government secrets, posted 8,761 documents and files on Tuesday that it said came from the CIA’s Centre for Cyber Intelligence.

The trove, if legitimate, discloses malware, viruses, security vulnerabilities known as “zero days” and several hundred million lines of code used by the Central Intelligence Agency. It also reveals that the agency has the ability to break into devices and intercept messages before they can be encrypted by applications such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Confide. “At first glance it is probably legit or contains a lot of legitimate stuff, which means somebody managed to extract a lot of data from a classified CIA system and is willing to let the world know that,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an email. CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in an email, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

The types of hacking capabilities purportedly disclosed by WikiLeaks aren’t easily replaced once they are disclosed and targets can develop defences against them, according to a former National Security Agency cyber engineer, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information. The alleged leaks are a reminder of how important, yet difficult, data protection is for intelligence agencies, added the former official, who said there appeared to be a crisis in operational security over maintaining confidentiality.

WikiLeaks boasted on Tuesday that its CIA leak “eclipses” the number of pages in Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures of National Security Agency programmes. “It could be potentially more dangerous than Snowden,” said Bob Stasio, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. “The Snowden leaks were damaging but were never linked to an actual threat of life that we know of. If this leak turns out to be genuine, the lives of people who have worked with the CIA could be at risk.”

Last year, WikiLeaks posted thousands of stolen emails to and from Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman.

WikiLeaks has denied it obtained the Clinton emails from Russia, which US intelligence agencies have said was responsible for hacking during last year’s campaign to hurt Clinton and, ultimately, help Donald Trump win the White House. In an analysis it released Tuesday, WikiLeaks said the CIA’s remote devices branch had a group called Umbrage, which maintains a “substantial library” of attack methods from malware produced in other countries, including Russia.

WikiLeaks said the CIA documents showed the agency is able to defeat encryption on popular applications such as WhatsApp by simply hacking into the devices “that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied”, WikiLeaks said.

WhatsApp has 1.2 billion monthly users, while Telegram has more than 100 million. Signal was the 32nd most popular app on Google’s Play app as of Monday, according to App Annie, which tracks app data. Telegram was 37th and WhatsApp was second. Islamic State activists, journalists and others often turn to such outlets for secure communications, while terrorist groups such as Islamic State have used Telegram to go undetected. US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have said that they need new powers to break into encrypted applications and devices.

WikiLeaks said the material it disclosed “appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive”. While the material may reveal sensitive CIA techniques, it doesn’t list “executables or exploits” – details on actual attacks that have been carried out and the targets – according to Weaver, who was beginning to analyse the documents. Google’s Android runs more than 85 per cent of the world’s smartphones, while Apple’s iOS runs 13 per cent, according to research firm IDC.

Spokeswomen for Google and Apple didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment about the WikiLeaks disclosures. Facebook declined to comment. The CIA also “runs a very substantial effort to infect and control” Microsoft Windows users with its malware, including infecting removable media such as USB drives, WikiLeaks said. The Windows operating system runs more than 90 per cent of desktop computers, according to Net Applications. A Microsoft representative said in an email: “We’re aware of the report and are looking into it.”

In a tactic dubbed “Weeping Angel” in the documents, hackers attack Samsung smart TVs, “transforming them into covert microphones”, according to WikiLeaks. The agency uses the US consulate in Frankfurt as a “covert base for its hackers” covering Europe, Middle East and Africa, according to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks said it redacted and removed some identifying information in the content, including tens of thousands of “CIA targets and attack machines’’ in Latin America, Europe and the US. The group said it has withheld releasing “armed” cyberweapons until “a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s programme and how such ‘weapons’ should analysed, disarmed and published.”

The leaked documents show that the government has “deliberately maintained vulnerabilities in the most common devices used by hundreds of millions of people”, Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement. “Those vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and governments around the world.” He said helping companies patch “security holes immediately, not stockpiling them, is the best way to make everyone’s digital life safer”. – (Bloomberg)
WikiLeaks releases thousands of documents that it claims provides details of surveillance software used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.