A new report from Reuters has follow-up information on the fallout from Wikileaks’ Vault 7 e-mail leaks. The leaks contained information revealing that the CIA has been working on ways to spy on people through smart TVs, smart phones, any web connected device, cameras, and tablets – the leaks even revealed control mechanisms to remotely commandeer cars and vehicles. One of the implications of the leaks was that the CIA had been staging hack attacks against companies and signing it with Russian Cyrillic in order to frame Russia for the attacks; security experts and firms have recently confirmed this to be true.
In the report, Reuters noted that U.S. cyber security expert Robert Graham explained that the signatures and methods used by the CIA to frame Russia for hack attacks that was described in the Wikileaks e-mails was fact-checked by security firms, and they have confirmed that it does appear as if Russia has been framed for some alleged hack attacks. Graham stated in a post over on Errata Security…
“Already, one AV researcher has told me that a virus they once suspected came from the Russians or Chinese can now be attributed to the CIA, as it matches the description perfectly to something in the leak. We can develop anti-virus and intrusion-detection signatures based on this information that will defeat much of what we read in these documents. This would put a multi-year delay in the CIA’s development efforts. Plus, it’ll now go on a witch-hunt looking for the leaker, which will erode morale.
Graham, however, also defends the current narrative that the Russians still hacked the DNC, claiming in a separate section that there’s nothing in the Vault 7 release that absolves the Russians of having hacked the Democratic National Committee, writing…
“In the coming days, biased partisans are going to seize on the CIA leaks as proof of “false flag” operations, calling into question Russian hacks. No, this isn’t valid. We experts in the industry criticized “malware techniques” as flimsy attribution, long before the Sony attack, and long before the DNC hacks. All the CIA leaks do is prove we were right. On the other hand, the DNC hack attribution is based on more than just this, so nothing in the CIA leaks calls into question that attribution.”
This does contradict what Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has stated, where he firmly made it known that the leaked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee did not come from the Russians. In a Fox News interview, Assange stated…
“Our source is not in the state party. The answer for our interactions [with Russian] is no.”
[…] “We can say – we have said this repeatedly over the last two months – our source is not the Russian government, and it is not state party.”
Graham doesn’t clarify exactly if he’s talking about the DNC hacks in relation to what Wikileaks released, or some other instance of hacking taking place, but the real damaging e-mails were leaked to Wikileaks and Assange has strongly denied ties to State Party tampering on Russia’s behalf.
The news media, however, has fully committed to claiming that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee despite a lack of evidence and Wikileaks stating otherwise. Now, there’s additional proof that the CIA have at least attempted to frame Russia for some hacking vulnerabilities.
