TechCrunch | Weekly Roundup: WikiLeaks strikes again, Google outlines cloud strategy TechCrunch WikiLeaks strikes again. The org released a huge set of more than 8,000 documents called Vault 7, claiming to detail the CIA's efforts to hack popular consumer devices like iPhones, Android phones and Samsung smart TVs. Apple pushed back and said ... |
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Weekly Roundup: WikiLeaks strikes again, Google outlines cloud strategy - TechCrunch
New York Times | WikiLeaks, Donald Tusk, European Central Bank: Your Friday Briefing New York Times The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, moved to seize the moment after his organization released a new trove of classified information about the C.I.A.'s cyberweaponry. Speaking from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has sought refuge ... |
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WikiLeaks, Donald Tusk, European Central Bank: Your Friday Briefing - New York Times
Over the weekend, the longtime Trump confidant tweeted that he had a "back channel" to WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign -- only to later delete it.
"[N]ever denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary," Stone tweeted late Saturday night. The post was gone after almost 40 minutes.
Last weekend's Twitter flare-up raised questions anew about Stone, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2015 and claims to have a connection to WikiLeaks and its leader, Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks took to Twitter, saying it was unaware of communications between Stone and the organization or Assange.
Stone said on Twitter more than a week later that it would soon be Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's "time in the barrel."
The message proved prescient. In early October, WikiLeaks began posting Podesta's emails online for public consumption.
WikiLeaks has denied that Russia was the source for its disclosures, and the Russian government has emphatically denied any connection with the theft as well.
"I do have a back-channel communication with Assange because we have a good mutual friend," he said in the October interview.
Throughout these media appearances, Stone has also categorically denied any contact with Russia besides an affinity for its alcoholic beverages.
And from the margins, Stone cheered on his friend and insulted his critics.
With that nod toward victory, Stone has continued what he's done all along: making profane statements attacking his political opponents, stirring up fights and defending his longtime friend -- who now occupies the Oval Office.
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As Russia probe looms, Roger Stone touts relationship to WikiLeaks - CNN
Manning. Snowden. Whose name is next to be added to the notorious list of government leakers?
The CIA is trying to answer that question right now.
A day after WikiLeaks released what it alleged to be the entire hacking capacity of the CIA, the focus Wednesday began shifting to just who gave the stunning surveillance information to the anti-secrecy website.
There is heavy s--- coming down, said a veteran cyber contractor for the intelligence community who previously worked in the breached unit, the CIAs Center for Cyber Intelligence.
WIKILEAKS RELEASES 'ENTIRE HACKING CAPACITY' OF CIA
The contractor told Fox News that CCI has long maintained an internal database of information -- accessible to anyone with proper credentials or security clearance -- that seemed to be dumped in total to WikiLeaks. In its news release on the disclosure, WikiLeaks said CCI had more than 5,000 registered users, a number alternatively referred to as absurd and a bit high by security experts who spoke to Fox News.The CIA declined comment to Fox News.
The FBI opened a federal criminal investigation into the WikiLeaks disclosure on Wednesday, Fox News confirmed. As the probe gets underway,experts said theres a typical incident response playbook they would use to narrow down the massive pool of suspects.
Theyre going to try to do some forensic work because those documents probably have been changed [over time], so that enables them to narrow down the period to when they were taken, said Alex Yampolskiy, the CEO of SecurityScorecard. Once you say this seems like it was a snapshot from this particular time, then they can look at audit logs of who had access to the document during that time frame.
Yampolskiy said analysts would likely target the most sensitive documents that were revealed during their forensic work, as only those with a higher security clearance would have had access to them again, shrinking the group of suspects.
Once a core group is established, investigators would institute behavioral profiling.
Theyll run certain types of analytics what websites did they access? What are the emails? How many people are still working there? Yampolskiy said.
Regardless of the results of the inquiry, Brian Vecci, a technological evangelist for cybersecurity company Varonis, said the secret trove revealed by WikiLeaks illustrates the pervasive issue of another major data breach of a major government organization tasked with security.
Whats clear to me -- and this is true of pretty much every big data breach -- the preventive controls were broken, or the detective controls were broken, Vecci said. Meaning, either too many people had access to the information, or the people that had access werent being recorded and analyzed. Or both.
Last year SecurityScorecard ranked 18 industries by their cybersecurity performance. Information services, construction and food ranked 1, 2 and 3, respectively. Government was dead last.
But there was a twist, Yampolskiy said.
The CIA was specifically one of the top performers in the government, he said. An A letter grade.
Fox News Catherine Herridge and James Rosen contributed to this report.
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WikiLeaks reveal of CIA hacking trove has feds on mole hunt ...
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails leaked to and subsequently published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016. This collection included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States' Democratic Party.[1] The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members, and date from January 2015 to May 2016.[2] The leak prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz before the Democratic National Convention.[3] After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.[4]
WikiLeaks did not reveal its source; a self-styled hacker going by the moniker Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the attack. On July 25, 2016, the FBI announced that it would investigate the hack.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] The same day, the DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters, stating, "On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email," and that the emails did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."[12] On November 6, 2016, WikiLeaks released a second batch of DNC emails, adding 8,263 emails to its collection.[13]
On December 9, 2016, the CIA told U.S. legislators that the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted operations during the 2016 U.S. election to prevent Hillary Clinton[14] from winning the presidency.[15] Multiple U.S intelligence agencies concluded people with direct ties to the Kremlin gave WikiLeaks hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.[15]
The leak revealed information about the DNC's interactions with the media, Hillary Clinton's and Bernie Sanders' campaigns, and financial contributions. It also includes personal information about the donors of the Democratic Party, including credit card and Social Security numbers, which could facilitate identity theft.[16][17]
The emails include DNC staff's "off-the-record" correspondence with media personalities, including the reporters at CNN,[18][19][20]Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.[21]
In the emails, DNC staffers derided the Sanders campaign.[22]The Washington Post reported: "Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically, all of these examples came late in the primaryafter Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victorybut they belie the national party committee's stated neutrality in the race even at that late stage."[23]
In a May 2016 email chain, the DNC chief financial officer (CFO) Brad Marshall told the DNC chief executive officer, Amy Dacy, that they should have someone from the media ask Sanders if he is an atheist prior to the West Virginia primary.[23][24] In another email, Wasserman Schultz said of Bernie Sanders, "He isn't going to be president."[22]
On May 21, 2016, DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach sent an email to DNC Spokesman Luis Miranda mentioning a controversy that ensued in December 2015 when the National Data Director of the Sanders campaign and three subordinate staffers accessed the Clinton campaign's voter information on the NGP VAN database.[25] (The party accused Sanders' campaign of impropriety and briefly limited their access to the database. The Sanders campaign filed suit for breach of contract against the DNC; they dropped the suit on April 29, 2016.)[24][26][27] Paustenbach suggested that the incident could be used to promote a "narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess." (The suggestion was rejected by the DNC.) [23][24]The Washington Post wrote: "Paustenbach's suggestion, in that way, could be read as a defense of the committee rather than pushing negative information about Sanders. But this is still the committee pushing negative information about one of its candidates."[23]
In the aftermath of the Nevada Democratic convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote about Jeff Weaver, manager of Bernie Sanders' campaign: "Damn liar. Particularly scummy that he barely acknowledges the violent and threatening behavior that occurred".[28][29][30]
In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski called on Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down over the DNC's bias against the Bernie Sanders campaign.[31][32] Schultz was upset at the negative coverage of her actions in the media, and she emailed Chuck Todd that such coverage of her "must stop".[33][34] Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski.[35][36]
The New York Times wrote that the cache included "thousands of emails exchanged by Democratic officials and party fund-raisers, revealing in rarely seen detail the elaborate, ingratiating and often bluntly transactional exchanges necessary to harvest hundreds of millions of dollars from the partys wealthy donor class. The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most precious of currencies."[37] As is common in national politics, large party donors "were the subject of entire dossiers, as fund-raisers tried to gauge their interests, annoyances and passions."[37]
In a series of email exchanges in April and May 2016, DNC fundraising staff discussed and compiled a list of people (mainly donors) who might be appointed to federal boards and commissions.[38]Center for Responsive Politics senior fellow Bob Biersack noted that this is a longstanding practice in the United States: "Big donors have always risen to the top of lists for appointment to plum ambassadorships and other boards and commissions around the federal landscape."[38] The White House denied that financial support for the party was connected to board appointments, saying: "Being a donor does not get you a role in this administration, nor does it preclude you from getting one. Weve said this for many years now and there's nothing in the emails that have been released that contradicts that."[38]
A self-styled hacker going by the moniker "Guccifer 2.0" claimed to be the source of the leaks;[39][40] WikiLeaks did not reveal its source.[21]Cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, and ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, stated the leak was part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC committed by two Russian intelligence groups.[41][42][43][44][45][46]U.S. intelligence agencies also stated (with "high confidence"[47]) that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the DNC, according to reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post.[47][48][49][50][51]
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange initially stuck to WikiLeaks policy of neither confirming or denying sources but in January 2017 said that their "source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party",[52][53] and the Russian government said it had no involvement.[54]
On October 7, 2016, the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that the US intelligence community was confident that the Russian government directed the breaches and the release of the obtained or allegedly obtained material in an attempt to " interfere with the US election process."[55][56][57]
The U.S. Intelligence Community tasked resources debating why Putin chose summer 2016 to escalate active measures influencing U.S. politics.[58]Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said after the 201113 Russian protests, Putin's confidence in his viability as a politician was damaged, and Putin responded with the propaganda operation.[58] Former CIA officer Patrick Skinner explained the goal was to spread uncertainty.[59] U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff, Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, commented on Putin's aims, and said U.S. intelligence agencies were concerned with Russian propaganda.[58] Speaking about disinformation that appeared in Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland, Schiff said there was an increase of the same behavior in the U.S.[58] Schiff concluded Russian propaganda operations would continue against the U.S. after the election.[58]
On December 9, 2016, the CIA told U.S. legislators the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted operations during the 2016 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump in winning the presidency.[15][60][61] Multiple U.S intelligence agencies concluded people with direct ties to the Kremlin gave WikiLeaks hacked emails from the DNC and additional sources such as John Podesta, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton.[15] These[citation needed] intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia attempted to hack the Republican National Committee (RNC) as well as the DNC but were prevented by security defenses on the RNC network.[62][63]
The CIA said the foreign intelligence agents were Russian operatives previously known to the U.S.[15] CIA officials told U.S. Senators it was "quite clear" Russia's intentions were to help Trump.[60] Trump released a statement December 9, and disregarded the CIA conclusions.[15]
On July 18, 2016, Russian press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated that the Russian government had no involvement in the DNC hacking incident.[64] Peskov called it "paranoid" and "absurd",[65] saying: "We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the US election campaign."[66] That position was later reiterated by the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, which called the allegation "entirely unrealistic".[67]
On July 24, 2016, Sanders urged Wasserman Schultz to resign following the leak and stated that he was "disappointed" by the leak, but that he was "not shocked."[45][68] Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, called for greater accountability in the DNC, calling Wasserman Schultz "a figure of disunity" within the Democratic Party.[69][70] Later the same day, Wasserman Schultz resigned from her position as DNC Chairman, effective as of the end of the nominating convention.[71] After Wasserman Schultz resigned, Sanders said that she had "made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party."[72] On the following day, the DNC apologized to Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and the Democratic Party for "inexcusable remarks made over email." [73] On July 24, 2016, in an interview with NPR, former DNC Chair and current Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe said "... that the chair's job should be "to remain neutral." "I sat in that chair in 2004 trying to navigate all the different candidates we had. But if you had people in there who were trashing one of the candidates, I can tell you this, if I were still chairman they wouldn't be working there. I mean, that is just totally unacceptable behavior."[74]
On July 25, 2016, Anthony Zurcher, North America reporter for the BBC, commented that "the revelation that those in the heart of the Democratic establishment sought to undermine the anti-establishment Sanders is roughly on a par with [Casablanca character] police Capt Renault's professed shock that gambling was taking place in the Casablanca club he was raiding, as a waiter hands him his winnings."[75]
On July 25, 2016, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said that "Today's events show really what an uphill climb the Democrats are facing this week in unifying their party. Starting out the week by losing your party chairman over longstanding bitterness between factions is no way to keep something together." [76]
On October 14, 2016, NBC News reported that multiple sources were telling them that Barack Obama had ordered the CIA to present him with options for a retaliatory cyber attack against the Russian Federation for allegedly interfering in the US presidential election. Sources said that this is not the first time the CIA has presented such options to a president, but that on all previous occasions the decision was made not to carry out the proposed attacks.[77]
The New York Times reported that Julian Assange stated in an interview on British ITV on June 12, 2016, that he hoped that the publication of the emails would "...harm Hillary Clinton's chances to win the presidency" and that he had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention.[47][78] In an interview with CNN, Assange would neither confirm nor deny who WikiLeaks' sources were; he claimed that his website "...might release "a lot more material" relevant to the US electoral campaign..." [79]
Following the publication of the stolen emails, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticized WikiLeaks for its wholesale leakage of data, writing that "their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake."[17] The Washington Post contrasted the difference between WikiLeaks' practices and Snowden's disclosure of information about NSA: while Snowden worked with journalists to vet documents (withholding some where it would endanger national security), WikiLeaks' "more radical" approach involves the dumping of "massive, searchable caches online with fewif anyapparent efforts to remove sensitive personal information."[17]
On July 25, 2016, Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post, writes that "with the exception of a few people on Twitter and a handful of print journalists, most of those covering this story, especially on television, are not interested in the nature of the hackers, and they are not asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. They are focusing instead on the content of what were meant to be private emails..." She goes on to describe in detail other Russian destabilization campaigns in Eastern European countries.[80]
On July 25, 2016, Thomas Rid, Professor in Security Studies at Kings College, London, and non-resident fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC, summed up the evidence pointing to Russia being behind the hacking of the DNC files and the "Guccifer-branded leaking operation". He concludes that these actions successfully blunted the "DNC's ability to use its opposition research in surprise against Trump...". [43] He further writes that data exfiltration from political organizations is done by many countries and is considered to be a legitimate form of intelligence work. "But digitally exfiltrating and then publishing possibly manipulated documents disguised as freewheeling hacktivism is crossing a big red line and setting a dangerous precedent: an authoritarian country directly yet covertly trying to sabotage an American election."[43]
Russian security expert and investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov said "It is almost impossible to know for sure whether or not Russia is behind a hack of the DNC's servers". According to him, one of the reasons Russia would try to sway the US presidential election is that the Russian government considers Clinton "a hater of Russia": "There is this mentality in Russia of being besieged; that it is always under attack from the United States. ...They are trying to interfere in our internal affairs so why not try to do the same thing to them?"[81]
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2016 Democratic National Committee email leak - Wikipedia
New York Times | WikiLeaks Will Help Tech Companies Fix Security Flaws, Assange Says New York Times The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said the Central Intelligence Agency lost control of a large arsenal of cyberwarfare tools and then covered up that the material was not secured. He said WikiLeaks is working with companies like Apple and ... Julian Assange Says WikiLeaks Will Share CIA Code With Tech Companies Julian Assange Says WikiLeaks May Release More CIA Hacking Tools WikiLeaks pledges to release software code of CIA hacking tools to tech firms |
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WikiLeaks Will Help Tech Companies Fix Security Flaws, Assange Says - New York Times
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump declared, "I love WikiLeaks!" And he had good reason to display affection to this website run by accused rapist Julian Assange. By releasing reams of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, WikiLeaks helped tilt the 2016 election in Trump's favor.
As president, Trump hasn't come out and said anything laudatory about WikiLeaks following its massive disclosure of CIA secrets on Tuesday - a treasure trove that some experts already believe may be more damaging than Edward Snowden's revelations. But Trump hasn't condemned WikiLeaks. The recent entries on his Twitter feed - a pure reflection of his unbridled id - contain vicious attacks on, among other things, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the New York Times, and Barack Obama but not a word about WikiLeaks. Did the president not notice that the intelligence community he commands has just suffered a devastating breach of security? Or did he simply not feel compelled to comment?
Actually there is a third, even more discomfiting, possibility: Perhaps Trump is staying silent because he stands to benefit from WikiLeaks' latest revelations.
On Saturday, recall, Trump was making wild-eyed accusations that Obama had ordered the U.S. intelligence community to wiretap him. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" The White House could not come up with one iota of evidence to support this irresponsible allegation, which was denied by FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Trump would not be dissuaded from pursuing this charge, which serves as a convenient distraction from the far more serious accusations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while Russia was interfering with the presidential campaign.
Is it just a coincidence that WikiLeaks dumped a massive database pertaining to CIA hacking and wiretapping just three days after Trump made wiretapping a major political issue? Perhaps so. But there is cause for suspicion.
In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage.
In the second place, WikiLeaks, which has often leaked American but never Russian secrets, has been identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a front for Russian intelligence. In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified estimate that found "with high confidence that Russian military intelligence relayed material to WikiLeaks." This was done with a definite purpose: "Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him."
Trump has consistently resisted the intelligence agency's conclusions, insisting that some 400-pound coach potato might have committed the hacking before grudgingly accepting the findings but continuing to claim that the Russian hack had no impact on the election. (Given that 70,000 votes in three states were his margin of victory, how does he know what affected the outcome and what didn't? And if WikiLeaks was so inconsequential, why did he tout its revelations in almost every appearance during the last month of the campaign?)
The intelligence community's finding that Putin helped him win the election spurred Trump to pursue a vendetta against it. For example, he accused the spooks - with no support - of being behind BuzzFeed's publication of a damning dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer claiming that the Kremlin had compiled compromising materials on him. Trump outrageously tweeted: "Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to 'leak' into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?" His animus against the intelligence agencies has continued down to his more recent accusations that they allowed themselves to be used by Obama to wiretap him. The consistent (if hardly believable) storyline from Trump is that he has no connections to Russia, and that he is a victim of the nefarious machinations of the American "deep state."
It is significant, therefore, that one of the major storylines to emerge from the latest WikiLeaks release is that the CIA supposedly has a program to reuse computer codes from foreign hackers, thus disguising CIA fingerprints on a hacking operation. Never mind that there is no evidence that the codes used to break into the DNC were part of this CIA database. Right-wing outlets are nevertheless trumpeting these revelations with headlines such as this one on Breitbart: "WikiLeaks: CIA Uses 'Stolen' Malware to 'Attribute' Cyberattacks to Nations Like Russia." Russian-controlled Internet "bots" are also said to be playing up these claims online.
The implication is clear. Trump was a victim of a "false flag" operation wherein CIA hackers broke into the DNC and blamed the Russians. This may be nutty, but it's eminently believable to an audience conditioned to believe that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged - favorite tropes of the radio talk-show host Alex Jones, whose work Trump has praised. Other WikiLeaks revelations - for instance, that the CIA can use Samsung smart TVs as listening devices - lend further credence to Trump's charge that he was secretly wiretapped.
Quite apart from its specifics, the WikiLeaks release changes the subject after a bad few days for Trump highlighted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision to recuse himself from any Kremlingate probe after he was revealed to have lied under oath when he denied meeting any Russian representatives. Last week it was Trump on the defensive. Now it's his nemeses in the U.S. intelligence community who are answering embarrassing questions about how this leak could have occurred and the contents of the leaked information.
Again, maybe this is entirely coincidental, but WikiLeaks' history of being used by Russian intelligence to support Trump should lead to much greater scrutiny not only of who leaked this information - is there a mole in the CIA? - but why it was released now. Even if there is no active collusion between the White House and the Kremlin, the extent to which their agendas coincide is striking. Both Putin and Trump want to discredit the U.S. intelligence community because they see it as an obstacle to their power.
---
Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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WikiLeaks has joined the Trump administration - Chicago Tribune
Microsoft says PCs powered by its latest Windows 10 software should be safe from alleged CIA hacking tools.
The Central Intelligence Agency's alleged hacking tools shouldn't be able to crack the latest Windows PCs.
That's according to a Microsoft statement Thursday afternoon, which was responding to a Tuesday data dump from WikiLeaks that accused the CIA of creating programs that take advantage of unknown vulnerabilities in nearly all the world's mobile phones, tablets and computers. The software can even target smart TVs and connected cars, WikiLeaks said. CNET hasn't been able to verify whether the documents are real or have been altered.
Regardless, Microsoft said computers powered by its Windows 10 software should be safe from the "dated" vulnerabilities that appear to target "older systems."
"We take security issues very seriously and are continuing a deeper analysis to determine if additional steps are necessary to further protect our customers," the company said in an emailed statement. It also pledged to send updates to customers should any new threats be found.
Apple and Google have similarly said customers running their latest software appear to be safe from vulnerabilities, though about 97 percent of devices powered by Android are running on older software.
Other tech giants, like Samsung and LG, are still looking into the situation.
CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET's newsstand edition.
Life, disrupted: In Europe, millions of refugees are still searching for a safe place to settle. Tech should be part of the solution. But is it?
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Microsoft: Systems seem safe from WikiLeaks alleged CIA hacks - CNET
Julian Assange.
PARIS (AP) WikiLeaks will work with technology companies to help defend them against the Central Intelligence Agencys hacking tools, founder Julian Assange said Thursday, an approach which sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an agency stung by the radical transparency groups disclosures.
In an online press conference, Assange acknowledged that some companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published Tuesday.
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We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out, Assange said. Once tech firms had patched their products, he said, he would release the full data of the hacking tools to the public.
The CIA has so far declined to comment directly on the authenticity of the leak, but in a statement issued Wednesday it suggested that the release had been damaging by equipping adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.
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Assange began his online press conference with a dig at the agency for losing control of its cyberespionage arsenal, saying that all the data had been kept in one place.
Should the spy agency exploit security flaws in software instead of warning companies to fix them?
This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, he said, adding that, WikiLeaks discovered the material as a result of it being passed around.
Assange said the technology was nearly impossible to keep under wraps or under control.
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Theres absolutely nothing to stop a random CIA officer or even a contractor from using the technology, Assange said. The technology is designed to be unaccountable, untraceable; its designed to remove traces of its activity.
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WikiLeaks will give details of CIA hacking tools to tech companies - The Boston Globe
PARIS WikiLeaks will work with technology companies to help defend them against the Central Intelligence Agencys hacking tools, founder Julian Assange said Thursday, an approach that sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an agency stung by the radical transparency groups disclosures.
In an online news conference, Assange acknowledged some companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published Tuesday.
We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out, Assange said. Once tech firms had patched their products, he said, he would release the full data of the hacking tools to the public.
The CIA has so far declined to comment directly on the authenticity of the leak, but in a statement issued Wednesday it suggested that the release had been damaging by equipping adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.
Assange began his online press conference with a dig at the agency for losing control of its cyberespionage arsenal, saying that all the data had been kept in one place.
This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, he said, adding that, WikiLeaks discovered the material as a result of it being passed around.
Assange said the technology was nearly impossible to keep under wraps or under control.
Theres absolutely nothing to stop a random CIA officer or even a contractor from using the technology, Assange said. The technology is designed to be unaccountable, untraceable; its designed to remove traces of its activity.
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WikiLeaks to help defend tech companies from CIA hacks - Topeka Capital Journal