Finally, we have a ‘snowden’ event for the CIA and the inner workings of how the agency operates in the digital ‘cyber’ sphere. Wikileaks released “Vault7” – a treasure trove of documents pertaining to their ‘cyberwarfare’ or in layman’s terms, hacking operations. Since we’ve released Splitting Pennies, in the hope of explaining how the world ‘really’ works – we’ve received mostly positive feedback, but many mainstream readers have accused us of being ‘conspiracy theorists’ – well now we have the proof. The CIA has spent millions of dollars, hired the best computer experts in the world, and developed a series of world class hacking tools. These aren’t just your normal Ion Cannon or ‘scripts’ – these are the most sophistocated and powerful hacking tools in the world. So sophistocated, they fooled software titans like Google and Microsoft (who have their own in-house security experts). More alarmingly, the CIA allowed this information to be proliferated into unclassified hands and eventually to end up in Wikileaks:
Recently, 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. 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.
What’s not clear yet at this point, if the ‘source’ was a lone ranger, or it was a coordinated release. Or, the source may have been one of the unclassified users who accidentally received these files or access to them in a breach, and felt obligated to forward them to wikileaks. Possibly we’ll never know, but it doesn’t really matter. Like previous leaks, these documents are an inner working ‘blueprint’ of CIA’s modern internet operations.
Side note: Interestingly, the author of this article just ordered this must read book: Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion .. An agent for the public defender’s office told me that when he worked for the DEA they did a huge cocaine import bust and turned out they almost arrested CIA agents who flashed their badges and told them ‘get out of here, this is not for you’ .. The book starts out with a bang; Gary Webb interviews the largest drug dealer of all time, Freeway Ricky Ross. What does Crack-Cocaine, the CIA, and all this have to do with FX and markets? They go where the money is, and as we’ve exposed in previous articles – the CIA manipulates FX markets more than the Fed. Actually, the Fed has a rough time manipulating any currency other than the USD, which is where the CIA comes in handy.
So the point here is that, running drugs was something that served a purpose in the 80s. In the 90s it was all about privitization and seizing assets in previously communist countries, setting up shop in South America, planting the trojan horse(s) in Asia, etc. Last 10 years has been all about social media and the physical monitoring of citizens, including but not limited to genius designs like Pokemon GO which quite literally, will film and record your every move. The designers probably wish there was a mobile penetration like Russia (99%) in USA there are still those who don’t use or have Mobile Phones.
Anyway, this release shows the massive budgetary and man-force efforts the CIA has been undergoing to create what is quite possibly the largest and most powerful hacking enterprise ever to exist on the face of the earth. Criminal hackers, mafia, and other players – they don’t have the budget, they don’t have the CIA and entire DOD aparatus behind them. This is quite frankly, a “White Elephant” for a number of reasons, and ironically, the poor operational security led to a leak exposing and thus nullifying the entire operation (as is stated in the documents). Who knows, maybe there are 2 operations, one in VA and one in Singapore, or in a Volcano in Indonesia..
Also ironically, the CIA has been jumping like a Jack Russell clamoring for the investigation into the “Russian Hacking” into the elections. Well, maybe it’s not so ironic, maybe it was the CIA hacking all along, using the UMBRAGE group to paint Russia as the perpetrator, using cheaply designed stolen Malware from Ukraine.
The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch‘s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
At the end of the day, this is really a waste of taxpayer money. The fact that they have these tools shouldn’t surprise anyone, they are after all, a SPY agency. It was a surprise that the intelligence aparatus got behind the anti-Trump campaign but there was a reason why – Trump didn’t agree with their decades long ‘deep state’ agenda, and they know a threat when they see it. Government workers are very skilled at getting more money from a budget and keeping their jobs with continued benefits and raises (at least, at that level – this isn’t your local DMV!)
For those with good security, this is a non-issue. The Malware and other ‘tools’ described in the documents mostly rely on exploitation of security glitches or poor IT configurations. I mean who uses Mega, when you can use Dropbox (should be called NSAdropbox) where the apparatus can easily see your files without going through all this trouble of infecting your PC with Malware. And let’s be softy lefties, at least they invested in technology innovation and not weapons and torture devices, I mean they were’t strapping people to chairs and poking their eyes out.
