U.S. intelligence officials scrambled Tuesday to assess the scope and potential validity of a mountain of documents that the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks has begun publishing online with a claim that the trove consists of thousands of files from the CIA’s most secretive computer hacking operations.
“We are taking steps to figure out what this means,” one U.S. official told The Washington Times, hours after WikiLeaks announced the purported leak, saying it exposes a CIA program that can turn iPhones, Android cellphones and other commercial technology into clandestine mics and spy cams.
“These things take time,” said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, given the potential sensitivity of the purported leak. “This announcement just came this morning.”
It was not immediately clear whether the leak — which, if verified, would represent the most massive U.S. intelligence breach since Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping programs in 2013 — had taken officials at the CIA by surprise.
Jonathan Liu, a spokesman in the agency’s office of public affairs, issued the following statement to reporters Tuesday morning: “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”
WikiLeaks said in a press release that it had begun publishing an initial batch of some 8,761 documents and files containing computer hacking codes developed by an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The anti-secrecy organization said the materials had been provided by a U.S. government contractor, but provided few other details.
“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,” the organization said.
The archive, it claimed, shows the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, [including] Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
The documents could not immediately be authenticated.
But cybersecurity expert Jake Williams, the founder of Rendition Infosec, a private Augusta, Georgia-based company, told The Associated Press that the dump appears legitimate.
“There’s no question that there’s a fire drill going on right now,” Mr. Williams said. “It wouldn’t surprise me that there are people changing careers — and ending careers — as we speak.”
• S.A. Miller contributed to this story.
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