WikiLeaks says it has a trove on the CIA's hacking secrets. Washington Post national security reporter Greg Miller explains what these documents reveal. (Dalton Bennett,Greg Miller/The Washington Post) 
 
 The latest revelations about the U.S. government’s powerful hacking tools potentially takes surveillance right into the homes and hip pockets of billions of users worldwide, showing how a remarkable variety of everyday devices can be turned to spy on their owners. 
 
 Televisions, smartphones and even anti-virus software are all vulnerable to CIA hacking, according to the WikiLeaks documents released Tuesday. The capabilities described include recording the sounds, images and the private text messages of users, even when they resort to encrypted apps to communicate. 
 
 [WikiLeaks says it has obtained trove of CIA hacking tools] 
 
 While many of the attack technologies had been previously discussed at cybersecurity conferences, experts were startled to see evidence that the CIA had turned so many theoretical vulnerabilities into functioning attack tools against staples of modern life. These include widely used Internet routers, smartphones, and Mac and Windows computers. 
 
 In the case of a tool called “Weeping Angel” for attacking Samsung SmartTVs, WikiLeaks wrote, “After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on, In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.” 
 
 The CIA reportedly also has studied whether it could infect vehicle control systems for cars and trucks, which WikiLeaks alleged could be used to conduct “nearly undetectable assassinations.” 
 
 And a specialized CIA unit called the Mobile Devices Branch produced malware to control and steal information from iPhones, which according to WikiLeaks were a particular focus because of the smartphone’s popularity “among social, political diplomatic and business elites.” The agency also targeted popular phones running Google’s Android, the world’s leading mobile operating system. 
 
 Wikileaks said it redacted lists of CIA surveillance targets, though it said they included targets and machines in Latin America, Europe and the United States. The anti-secrecy group also said that by developing such intrusive technology — rather than helping tech companies patch flaws in their products — the CIA was undermining efforts to protect the cybersecurity of Americans. 
 
 “The argument that there is some terrorist using a Samsung TV somewhere — as a reason to not disclose that vulnerability to the company, when it puts thousands of Americans at risk — I fundamentally disagree with it, “ said Alex Rice, chief technology officer for Hacker One, a start-up that enlists hackers to report security gaps to companies and organizations in exchange for cash. 
 
 [The Trump White House is totally changing its tune on wiretapping and hoping you don’t notice] 
 
 The trove released Tuesday , which The Washington Post could not independently verify and the CIA has declined to confirm, included 8,761 documents that were the first batch of a series of releases that WikiLeaks plans, it said. 
 
 This first group, at least, shows important differences from the 2013 revelations by the National Security Agency’s former contractor Edward Snowden. His trove of documents largely described mass surveillance of Internet-based communications systems, while the WikiLeaks release more often describes attacks on individual devices. 
 
 By targeting devices, the CIA reportedly gains access to even well-encrypted communications, on such popular apps as Signal and WhatsApp, without having to crack the encryption itself. The WikiLeaks reports acknowledged that difference by saying the CIA had found ways to “bypass,” as opposed to defeat, encryption technologies. 
 
 “The idea that the CIA and NSA can hack into devices is kind of old news,” said Johns Hopkins cryptography expert Matthew D. Green. “Anyone who thought they couldn’t was living in a fantasy world.” 
 
 Snowden’s revelations and the backlash made strong encryption a major, well-funded cause for both privacy advocates and, perhaps more importantly, technology companies that had the engineering expertise and budgets to protect data as it flowed across the world. 
 
 Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies announced major new initiatives, in part to protect their brands against accusations by some users that they had made it too easy for the NSA to collect information from their systems. Many websites, meanwhile, began encrypting their data flows to users to prevent snooping. Encryption tools such as Tor were strengthened. 
 
 Encrypting apps for private messaging, such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp exploded in popularity, especially among users around the world who were fearful of government intrusion. In the days following the U.S. presidential election, Signal was among the most downloaded in Apple’s app store, and downloads grew by more than 300 percent. 
 
 Open Whispers Systems, which developed Signal, released a statement Tuesday, saying, “The CIA/WikiLeaks story today is about getting malware onto phones, none of the exploits are in Signal or break Signal Protocol encryption.” 
 
 WhatsApp declined to comment, and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment, while Samsung did not respond to requests for comment. 
 
 “While our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS, we will continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities. We always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security updates,” Apple spokesman Fred Sainz said in a statement Tuesday. 
 
 [Understanding cyberspace is key to defending against digital attacks] 
 
 U.S. government authorities complained loudly that the post-Snowden wave of encryption was undermining their ability to investigate serious crimes, such as terrorism and child pornography. The FBI in 2016 sued Apple in hopes of forcing it to unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernadino killers before announcing it had other ways to crack the device amid heavy public criticism. 
 
 Against that backdrop, many privacy advocates argued that devices — often called “endpoints” for their place on chains of communications that can crisscross continents — were the best available targets left in a world with widespread online encryption. The WikiLeaks documents suggests that the CIA may have reached the same conclusion. 
 
 “It would certainly be consistent with the hypothesis that we’ve made real progress in the encryption we’ve been introducing,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “It’s impossible to be 100 percent certain, but reading the tea leaves, it’s plausible.” 
 
 The WikiLeaks revelations also will serve as a reminder that, for whatever the political backlash to revelations about digital spying, it is not going away and probably will continue to grow. 
 
 Aside from the United States, many other advanced nations such as China, Russia, Britain and Israel have extremely sophisticated tools for digital spying. Less advanced nations have gained access to powerful online spying technology through a robust and lightly regulated industry of surveillance contractors based throughout the world. 
 
 On Tuesday, resignation and frustration rippled through Silicon Valley as technologists grappled with revelations of yet another U.S. government attempt to exploit their systems. And cybersecurity experts reacted with alarm. 
 
 “This is explosive,” said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm. The material highlights specific anti-virus products that can be defeated, going further than a release of NSA hacking tools last year, he said. 
 
 The WikiLeaks release revealed that the CIA has sophisticated “stealth” capabilities that enable hackers not only to infiltrate systems, but evade detection, as well as abilities to move inside a system freely as if they owned it. 
 
 Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley said the dates in the WikiLeaks files suggest the documents were taken in February or March 2016. At least two of them are marked Top Secret, “which suggests that somebody in early 2016 managed to compromise a Top Secret CIA development system and is willing to say that they did.” 
 
 One internal CIA document listed a set of Apple iPhone “exploits” — or tools that can be used to compromise the device by taking advantage of software flaws. Some of the tools are based on “zero-days,” which are software vulnerabilities that have not been shared with the manufacturer. So “some of these descriptions will allow Apple to fix the vulnerabilities,” Weaver said. “But at the same time, they’re out in the public and whoever stole this data could use them against U.S. interests.” 
 
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 How hard is it to get an intelligence wiretap? Pretty hard. 
 
 This pretty blond doll could be spying on your family ||||| Thanks to WikiLeaks, antivirus vendors will soon be able to figure out if you have been hacked by the CIA. 
 
 On Tuesday, WikiLeaks dumped a trove of 8,700 documents that allegedly detail the CIA’s secret hacking operations, including spying tools designed for mobile phones, PCs and smart TVs. 
 
 WikiLeaks has redacted the actual source code from the files to prevent the distribution of cyber weapons, it said. Nevertheless, the document dump—if real—still exposes some of the techniques that the CIA has allegedly been using. 
 
 Among those techniques are ways to bypass antivirus software from vendors including Avira, Bitdefender and Comodo, according to some of the leaked documents. 
 
 The CIA’s playbook out in the open 
 
 The documents even include some snippets of code that antivirus vendors can use to detect whether a hacking attempt may have come from the CIA, said Jake Williams, founder of security company Rendition InfoSec. 
 
 “In the documents, they (the CIA) mention specific code snippets used in operational tools,” Williams said. Antivirus vendors can use this to look at their customers’ networks for any traces of past intrusions. 
 
 That might be a big blow to the CIA’s surveillance operations. Now anyone, including foreign governments, can use the WikiLeaks dump to figure out if the CIA ever targeted them, according to Williams. 
 
 “I would bet my bank account that the hackers of the CIA have spent all day trying to remove their tools from high value networks,” he said. 
 
 WikiLeaks hasn’t said who supplied the secret documents. But the anonymous source is hoping to spark debate over whether the CIA abused its authority by developing so many hacking tools without public oversight, WikiLeaks said. 
 
 “There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange added in a statement. 
 
 But some security researchers believe WikiLeaks is trying to mislead the public by exaggerating the CIA’s hacking capabilities. “The press is getting taken for a ride today,” said Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group who studies vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS. 
 
 How real are the risks? 
 
 Although WikiLeaks has said the CIA documents show the agency can hack iPhones and Android smartphones for spying purposes, consumers shouldn’t necessarily be concerned, he said. 
 
 That’s because the dumped documents mostly mention exploits for iOS that appear to already be publicly known and have been patched. 
 
 “I have not found anything here that could be a danger to anyone running iOS 10 or above,” Strafach said. 
 
 Earlier news headlines and a tweet from WikiLeaks on Tuesday also suggested that the CIA hacking tools can bypass the encryption on messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal. But there’s no evidence that the CIA ever cracked the encryption, only that the agency developed exploits and malware to take over devices. 
 
 “The CIA/Wikileaks story today is about getting malware onto phones, none of the exploits are in Signal or break Signal Protocol encryption,” tweeted Open Whisper Systems, which developed the encryption used in the apps. 
 
 Journalists and security researchers are still looking over the dumped documents. But it doesn’t appear the hacking tools equate to mass surveillance, said Robert Graham, CEO of security firm Errata Security. 
 
 One hacking tool, code-named Weeping Angel, allegedly involves turning a Samsung smart TV into a monitoring device. But the tool seems to only work if a CIA agent can physically install it on the TV. 
 
 “When we look at the tools, they really give off the impression that they are used locally,” Graham said. “That some CIA agent has to walk in. It’s not remote hacking.” 
 
 Questions over vulnerabilities 
 
 Still, some privacy advocates are worried by the WikiLeaks document dump. They say it confirms that the U.S. government has known about key vulnerabilities in tech products, but decides to develop hacking tools around them, rather than help vendors patch them. 
 
 A document in the dump shows that CIA exploits for Apple’s iOS were allegedly purchased from the U.S. National Security Agency, British intelligence or bought from third-party providers. 
 
 The key danger is that malicious groups, such as foreign government hackers, might discover the vulnerabilities too—putting everyday users in harm’s way. 
 
 “As these leaks show, we’re all made less safe by the CIA’s decision to keep—rather than ensure the patching of—vulnerabilities,” wrote Cindy Cohn, executive director of privacy advocate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 
 
 “Even spy agencies like the CIA have a responsibility to protect the security and privacy of Americans,” she said. 
 
 But others aren’t so sure the document dump really shows that the CIA has been stockpiling information about vulnerabilities. 
 
 “It is difficult to tell this from the info we have at this point,” Ari Schwartz, a former White House senior director for cybersecurity, said in an email. “Questions that I would have are: Are they really previously unknown?” ||||| A vast portion of the CIA’s computer hacking arsenal appeared to have been exposed Tuesday by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which posted thousands of files revealing secret cyber-tools used by the agency to convert cellphones, televisions and other ordinary devices into implements of espionage. 
 
 The trove appeared to lay bare the design and capabilities of some of the U.S. intelligence community’s most closely guarded cyberweapons, a breach that is likely to cause immediate damage to the CIA’s efforts to gather intelligence overseas and place new strain on the U.S. government’s relationship with Silicon Valley giants including Apple and Google. 
 
 WikiLeaks, which claimed to have gotten the files from a current or former CIA contractor, touted the trove as comparable in scale and significance to the collection of National Security Agency documents exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. 
 
 But while the Snowden files revealed massive surveillance programs that gathered data on millions of Americans, the CIA documents posted so far by WikiLeaks appear mainly to unmask hacking methods that many experts already assumed the agency had developed. 
 
 U.S. intelligence officials and experts said details contained in the newly released documents suggest that they are legitimate, although that could not be independently verified, raising new worries about the U.S. government’s ability to safeguard its secrets in an era of cascading leaks of classified data. 
 
 (Reuters) 
 
 The files mention pieces of malware with names like “Assassin” and “Medusa” that seem drawn from a spy film, describing tools that the CIA uses to steal data from iPhones, seize control of Microsoft-powered computers or even make Internet-connected Samsung television sets secretly function as microphones. 
 
 The release of so many sensitive files appeared to catch the CIA, the White House and other government entities off-guard. A CIA spokesman would say only that “we do not comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents.” 
 
 In a statement, WikiLeaks indicated that the initial stockpile it put online was part of a broader collection of nearly 9,000 files that would be posted over time describing code developed in secret by the CIA to steal data from a range of targets. WikiLeaks said it redacted lists of CIA surveillance targets, though it said they included targets and machines in Latin America, Europe and the United States. 
 
 The release was described as a huge loss to the CIA by security experts and former U.S. intelligence officials. “It looks like really the backbone of their network exploitation kit,” said a former hacker who worked for the National Security Agency and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. 
 
 The breach could undermine the CIA’s ability to carry out key parts of its mission, from targeting the Islamic State and other terrorist networks to penetrating the computer defenses of sophisticated cyber-adversaries including Russia, China and Iran, former officials and tech specialists said. 
 
 “Any exposure of these tools is going to cause grave if not irreparable damage to the ability of our intelligence agencies to conduct our mission,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. 
 
 If legitimate, the release represents the latest major breach of sensitive U.S. government data to be put on global display in humiliating fashion by WikiLeaks, which came to prominence in 2010 with the exposure of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and military files. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has engaged in an escalating feud with the United States while taking refuge at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London from Swedish sexual assault allegations. 
 
 WikiLeaks’ latest assault on U.S. secrets may pose an early, potentially awkward security issue for President Trump, who has repeatedly praised WikiLeaks and disparaged the CIA. 
 
 Trump declared “I love WikiLeaks” last October during a campaign rally when he read from a trove of stolen emails about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, that had been posted to the organization's website. 
 
 White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment when asked about the CIA breach during a news briefing Tuesday. 
 
 [Why the CIA is using your TVs, smartphones and cars for spying] 
 
 WikiLeaks indicated that it obtained the files from a current or former CIA contractor, saying that “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.” 
 
 But the counterintelligence investigation underway at the CIA is also likely to search for clues to whether Russia had any role in the theft of the agency’s digital arsenal. U.S. intelligence officials allege that WikiLeaks has ties to Russian intelligence services. The website posted thousands of emails stolen from Democratic Party computer networks during the 2016 presidential campaign, files that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded were obtained and turned over to WikiLeaks as part of a cyber-campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin. 
 
 Experts and former intelligence officials said the latest files appear to be authentic in part because they refer to code names and capabilities known to have been developed by the CIA’s cyber-branch. 
 
 “At first glance,” the data release “is probably legitimate 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,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. 
 
 Faking a large quantity of data is difficult but not impossible, he noted. Weaver said he knows of one case of WikiLeaks deliberately neglecting to include a document in a data release and one case of WikiLeaks deliberately mislabeling stolen data, “but no cases yet of deliberately fraudulent information.” 
 
 [WikiLeaks releases thousands of documents about Clinton and internal deliberations] 
 
 WikiLeaks said the trove comprised tools — including malware, viruses, trojans and weaponized “zero day” exploits — developed by a CIA entity known as the Engineering Development Group, part of a sprawling cyber-directorate created in recent years as the agency shifted resources and attention to online espionage. 
 
 WikiLeaks labeled the trove “Vault 7” and said that it contains several hundred million lines of code, many of which are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in everyday consumer devices. 
 
 In a statement, WikiLeaks said the files enable the agency to bypass popular encryption-enabled applications — including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram — used by millions of people to safeguard their communications. 
 
 But experts said that rather than defeating the encryption of those applications, the CIA’s methods rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in the devices on which they are installed, a method referred to as “hacking the endpoint.” 
 
 [Why understanding cyberspace is key to defending against digital attacks] 
 
 WikiLeaks said that the files were created between 2013 and 2016 and that it would publish only a portion of the archive — redacting some sensitive samples of code — “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program.” 
 
 The organization did not clarify what achieving such a consensus would entail, but for now it appeared to be withholding fully formed pieces of ready-made code that could be used by other intelligence services or even novice hackers. 
 
 Still, the data release alarmed cybersecurity experts, who said the files contain snippets of code that could enable adversaries to replicate CIA capabilities or identify and root out CIA “implants” currently in place. 
 
 “This is explosive,” said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition InfoSec, a cybersecurity firm. The material highlights specific anti-virus products that can be defeated, going further than a release of NSA hacking tools last year, he said. The CIA hackers, according to WikiLeaks, even “discussed what the NSA’s . . . hackers did wrong and how the CIA’s malware makers could avoid similar exposure.” 
 
 Hackers who worked at the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit said the CIA’s library of tools looked comparable. The implants — software that enables hackers to remotely control a compromised device — are “very, very complex” and “at least on par with the NSA,” said one former TAO hacker. 
 
 Beyond hacking weapons, the files also purportedly reveal information about the organization of the CIA’s cyber-directorate and indicate that the agency uses the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, as a hacking hub for operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 
 
 Though primarily thought of as an agency that recruits spies, the CIA has taken on a larger role in electronic espionage over the past decade. In 2015 the agency created the Directorate of Digital Innovation, a division that puts cyber-work on equal footing with long-standing directorates devoted to conventional spying and analysis. 
 
 The CIA’s focus is more narrow and targeted than that of the NSA, which is responsible for sweeping up electronic communications on a large scale around the globe. By contrast, CIA efforts mainly focus on “close in” operations in which the agency at times relies on individuals carrying thumb drives or other devices to implant code on computer systems not connected to the Internet. 
 
 One of the most intriguing tools described in the files, called “Weeping Angel,” can apparently be used to put certain television sets into a fake “off” mode while activating a microphone that enables the CIA to capture any conversations in the surrounding space. 
 
 Ashkan Soltani and Julie Tate contributed to this report. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations 
 
 NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data 
 
 How hard is it to get an intelligence wiretap? Pretty hard. 
 
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– It's being called the CIA's "Snowden moment"—and it reveals secrets that paranoid time-travelers from the 1950s would find completely unsurprising, including suggestions that the agency has been spying on people through their TVs. The CIA is scrambling to deal with the fallout from WikiLeaks' release Tuesday of a vast trove of data on the agency's hacking tools. A former senior intelligence official tells the Washington Post that the leak, which experts believe is genuine, could "cause grave if not irreparable damage to the ability of our intelligence agencies to conduct our mission." A roundup of coverage: One hack, code-named Weeping Angel, allows spies to capture audio and possibly video from Samsung smart TVs that appear to be turned off. Wired has a guide to telling whether your TV has been hacked. PC World reports that the WikiLeaks release included snippets of code that antivirus vendors can now use to determine whether hacking attempts originated at the CIA. MIT Technology Review describes the leaked information, including news that the CIA has found vulnerabilities in iOS and Android, as "sinister" but not "particularly Earth-shattering" from a technological point of view. Business Insider examines some of WikiLeaks' claims and finds that there's no evidence that the CIA was able to crack the encryption of apps like Signal and WhatsApp. Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, tells the New York Times he's disturbed by signs that the government knew about vulnerabilities in electronic devices and kept them quiet to make spying easier. "Those vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and governments around the world," Wizner says. "Patching security holes immediately, not stockpiling them, is the best way to make everyone's digital life safer." Forbes spoke to security experts from several companies about the leak. They said the information about the CIA's technological capabilities is unsurprising, but that it should serve as a reminder to people that they cannot fully trust the security of their devices. "People need to wake up to the fact that they need to take responsibility for maintaining the privacy of their information and make no assumptions," says Ajay Arora, CEO of Vera. "At the end of the day, no one has your best interests in mind but you—people can't even trust their own government anymore. This is the tragic new normal we have to all unfortunately accept." Companies including Google, Samsung, and WhatsApp declined to comment, the Washington Post reports. Apple released a statement saying the issues disclosed in the leak were patched in a recent update and that they "always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security update." "Imagine a world where the actual CIA spends its time figuring out how to spy on you through your TV. That's today," tweeted Edward Snowden, though he added that while it may not feel like it, end-to-end encryption has actually made computer security a lot better than it used to be.