Tuesday, March 7, 2017
WikiLeaks unveils another trove of CIA hacking secrets
The next time you turn off your Samsung Smart TV, you may want to make sure you unplug it as well, as it otherwise might be listening in on your conversations and reporting back to the CIA.
WikiLeaks has unveiled a few more thousand documents and programs allegedly belonging to the CIA, which are filled with stuff that will be a God-send to "conspiracy theorists" worldwide. In there we find things ranging from simple travel tips to CIA agents moving to Europe (including the benefits of having free booze on some airlines, or the recommendation of using duty-free shopping when returning to USA), to the confirmation of the existence of tools that we would expect to see only in fiction series or films.
One of them targets Samsung's Smart TVs, so they can spy on a room even when they the TV is apparently turned off. The promise that 0-day vulnerabilities would be disclosed to manufacturers also appears to have been broken, with the CIA maintaining various ways to infect Android and iOS devices using such methods - and raising suspicions that they might not be the only ones able to take advantage of such vulnerabilities, in effect leaving every user, even high ranking USA officials, at risk for similar attacks launched by other countries Intelligence services.
In the batch of tools to infect and steal data from PCs, we also find creative techniques, with tools that can simulate normal things on the screen, such as watching a movie, watching slideshows, or even playing some games, while at the same time the system is being infected or harvesting data. I guess it will be a lot less stressful than staring at a progress bar that slowly fills its way up to 100%.
No doubt we'll be hearing a lot more about these new files, but till then... just assume all those crazy paranoid conspiracy theories out there, regarding "them" spying "us", to simply be true.
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