Screenshot of the first page of the CIA WikiLeaks Task Force's final report
An internal CIA report about the Vault 7 fiasco paints a damning picture of the main US spy agency. WikiLeaks released the CIA's hacking tools, likely leaked by an insider, while CIA chiefs were too busy cooking up Russiagate.
Vault 7 was the name given to cyber attack tools developed by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), and published by WikiLeaks in March 2017.
It was the largest data breach in Langley's history, with long-lasting consequences. For example,
Chinese cybersecurity companies recently used Vault 7 evidence to show that the US has been hacking China for over a decade.
According to a just-released internal CIA report, "CCI had prioritized building cyber weapons
at the expense of securing their own systems. Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax."
"Most of our sensitive cyber weapons were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report goes on to say.
The
heavily-redacted document actually dates back to October 2017 and was only made public Tuesday by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), in an effort to pressure the new Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe into imposing new security measures. While the CIA ineptitude is the obvious takeaway, no one seems to have noticed the real bombshell: the timing of the breach and its implications.
The report says the CIA "
did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017." Now, what all was happening between March 2016 and a year later? You guessed it: Russiagate!
Comment: On the heels of the Supreme Court's decisions on Monday, this comes as another blow to the Trump administration, which has been hammered non-stop since late May - since late January if you include the Covid-19 pandemic.