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CIA malware and hacking tools

wikileaks.org

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Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#421

Post by gdudeman »

alasdair_ wrote: post #315
jowiar wrote: post #272

Quit with the fucking conspiracy theories. Seriously -- can we get a fucking mod in here to get rid of this shit.

What conspiracy theory? Assange, the person most likely to actually know what happened, has stated that the source for the Podesta emails was a disgruntled "washington insider" In addition, former British ambassador Craig Murray (a man with a solid reputation and little reason to lie) claims to have personally met the source and insists that the source is definitely a political insider without ties to Russia. https:/…

Assange may have said that, but Podesta was hacked by a sloppy organization that used Bitly to attempt a hack on thousands of other accounts worldwide.

Assange has no reason to implicate Russia. It would also be very, very easy to give a disgruntled insider the email trove or help them stumble upon it.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke...

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#422

Post by angry-hacker »

thraway2016 wrote: post #368

Any guesses on why CNN and MSNBC are completely avoiding reporting this news?

Because they are too busy reporting "not fake news" such as: "Alec Baldwin says he might give up his Trump impression on 'SNL'". If you get your news from CNN, you're brainwashed.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#423

Post by hackuser »

arca_vorago wrote: post #373
vinhboy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that "Russians" hacked the election That's not the claim. In fact, multiple people have said that is not the claim. The claim is that the Russians influenced the election in favor of Trump by promoting propaganda against Clinton.

Actually, that was the claim, but once people started undermining the story they had to shift to the word "influence" to save face. This kind of shit is why middle-class rightwing America cheers when Trump calls out fake news . A complete inability to honestly say, ok, we don't know, or ok, we fucked up. Nope, the story always was X... sure it was.

Can you provide some evidence? Links to articles?

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#424

Post by caycep »

kbenson wrote: post #356
pjc50 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the weapon too secret to use sounds very Dr Strangelove, there have been slightly similar things with real weapons. The one I remember is when radar-triggered proximity shells were invented at the end of WW2 they were only issued for use on ships, so that undetonated shells would fall into the sea, so couldn't be recovered and investigated by the enemy.

Which makes perfect sense. Any weapon leaves some trace (even if only new theory as to what is possible), so its use against a party that does not have that technology but is capable of understanding the technology at some level will always give information to the enemy. Using a modern missile against an indigenous people will only impart that you are capable of that type of attach. Using a modern missile against WWI…

this is like the second law of thermodynamics as applied to warfare...

It's also along the lines of Sun Tzu-esque deception.

I suppose the modern example are the constant probing of air defenses by the attacker (i.e. the US and its array of electronic warfare suites), and the game theoretic calculation by the defender on whether to turn on their radars or not...

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#425

Post by NoGravitas »

homakov wrote: post #415
NoGravitas wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's nothing new, and it's obvious to us here on HN. However, I disagree that the intention can only be sensationalism. The average computer/smartphone user (or journalist!) absolutely does not understand that if their device's operating system is compromised, that so are all the apps they run. Saying that messages can be intercepted before they are encrypted is worth pointing out as a realistic consequence of…

Bypass encryption means they broke the protocol. They could say "also malware can read your private messages and anything else on your phone". But no, bypassing encryption sounds a lot better. Fake news.

I don't read it that way. To me, if they meant they broke the protocol, they would say "broke the encryption" or "defeated the encryption". "Bypass" implies to me that they get the information without interacting with the encryption.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#426

Post by tedunangst »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #288
apo wrote: post #92

In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of "Vault 7" — the CIA's weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse. The CIA made these systems unclassified. Why the CIA chose to make its cyberar…

So then there would be no justifiable reason to reject a FOIA request for the source code.

"classified" is not the only reason FOIA requests are denied.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#427

Post by angry-hacker »

zepto wrote: post #261

When will people stop pretending that Wikileaks is anything other than an anti-American political faction that is allied with Russia? If Assange truly believed in transparency and a new kind of open democracy, he would stop preferentially targeting the US and get on with showing the world how all of our governments are the same in this regard.

But Russia is not even trying to show they care about democracy or all the rights U.S preaches. We already know what Russia is.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#428

Post by Sunset »

brodie78382 wrote: post #341
guelo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That passage is just dumb. Copyright would not stop hackers from using the tool once it is leaked.

I think what it's trying to convey is that there's absolutely no legal recourse in any capacity for the CIA at this point to try and do any sort of damage control.

I am bemused by the naivete that they would care about legal recourse and not just blackbag you and Gitmo2.0 your posteriors if they felt like it.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#429

Post by jessedhillon »

zigzigzag wrote: post #271
troyvit wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/the-public-evidence... There is some evidence, but no definitive evidence. '"[SecureWorks] researchers assess with moderate confidence that the group is operating from the Russian Federation and is gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government," the report from SecureWorks concluded.'

The "evidence" appears to be simply that one anonymous group about which nothing is known was going after targets that would presumably be of interest to Russia. But that's simply heresy: such targets might also be of interest to western intelligence, or really anyone who wanted to stir up trouble by framing another country. All we can say is that the correlation is interesting, but that's about it.

This is why we have intelligence -- the evidence for almost anything of consequence will never be able to meet a judicial, syllogistic standard. The idea that we need mathematically perfect deduction before we can make actionable conclusions is an assumption on your part.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#430

Post by hackuser »

sparkling wrote: post #248
dmix wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also still hasn't been any public evidence that Wikileaks got their Podesta email data from Russians yet. So far we only know the DNC leaks were very likely Russian. That means until today only about ~50% of the 'election hacks' have been attributed to Russia with public evidence. Now this leak calls into question some of the evidence about the DNC hack [1]. This evidence being the malware was Russian. But ther…

There is no hard evidence where the DNC/Podesta leaks came from. However, Julian Assange has repeatedly said that the source is not the russian goverment or a affiliated state party [1] and in a other interview has hinted that the source may be Seth Rich [2], a former DNC staff member that was murdered in Washington DC. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyCOy25GdjQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg

> There is no hard evidence where the DNC/Podesta leaks came from. However, Julian Assange has repeatedly said ...

Assange's claims are not hard evidence either, nor do I trust him.

US intelligence agencies say the Russians were involved and that kind of activity by the Russians is corroborated by intelligence agencies in Europe.

The nature of intelligence operations is that, if done correctly, there is no hard evidence unless the perpetrator wants there to be.

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