CIA Makes use of Smart Devices to Spy on Citizens – The Iphone Spy Reveals.

CIA hackers found out a means to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages in real time, before the transmission may be encrypted by the apps transmitting them, based on the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps similar to Signal have rised since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence experts have attributed the spike to widespread concern among activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump would use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to focus on them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to stress over the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be.

But Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Open Whisper Systems, said, the data show that Signal and apps like it are actually working, if anything.
“End-to-end encryption has pushed intelligence agencies from unfettered access to mass surveillance to a world where they need to use expensive, high-risk, targeted attacks against individuals to gain access to their information,” he said. “If you use these kinds of attacks on a massive scale, it increases the danger of detection. So to break into people’s phones and get access to encrypted messages, these agencies now need to be very selective. I think that’s a good thing.”
Because end-to-end encryption means that only the people engaged in a conversation have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they’re sharing would be unable to make sense of it without the key.
But according to the leaked documents, the CIA seems to get bypassed this obstacle by hacking. Hackers that gain access to a device’s operating system may be able to record calls and messages instantly, as a person is speaking in their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you’ve malware on an operating-system level, you can record keystrokes as they’re being typed,” said Jeremiah Grossman, SentinelOne’s chief of security strategy.
Security professionals encouraged that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing that might happen is for users to lose faith in encryption-enabled tools and stop using them,” wrote Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “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 television – that millions of people round the world rely on.”
It was not straight clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that 24 such vulnerabilities were included by the data for Android devices alone. The data dump included a comprehensive list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Apple and Android devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have asked the government to hand over information on vulnerabilities and zero days it discovers. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which asked intelligence agencies to disclose as many security vulnerabilities as possible unless there was a demonstrated public interest in keeping some quiet.
For being opaque and difficult to enforce, while still allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that will compromise millions of devices to itself, critics have denounced the agreement.
The CIA cache published by WikiLeaks seems to validate these concerns, experts said, and point to a need for greater information sharing between tech companies and government agencies.
“If there is a vulnerability in the wild and it is not making it into the hands of the vendor so it can be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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