This post Trump’s Impending Crackdown on Cybersecurity appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
By now you’ve probably seen the WikiLeak/CIA headlines:
WikiLeaks not only sought to demonstrate that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal, but proved it. By the largest release of CIA intelligence documents in history, it was proven that the CIA lost control of its malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.
The release of some 7,818 web pages and 943 attachments, called the “Vault 7,” constitutes a broad cyber arsenal. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.
Not surprisingly, anonymous “cyber security experts” sympathetic to the surveillance state immediately played down the leaks claiming that “much of what was described in the documents was aimed at older devices that have known security flaws.”
But not everyone is so quick to dismiss the damage.
Joel Brenner, former U.S. top counterintelligence official, admitted the leak was “a big deal.” This release, described by WikiLeaks as only “an introductory disclosure,” would greatly assist rival states, cyber criminals and hackers trying to catch up to the more advanced cyber capabilities of countries like the U.S., Russia, China and Israel.
As with the NSA revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the largest technology companies are once again embarrassed by revelations about the level of their cooperation with intelligence agencies against their own consumers.
And, with no end of irony, they are angered to see evidence of additional government attacks on their products despite their support.
Equally angered are the U.S. and international companies dismayed to find out that the CIA did not disclose to the manufacturers their findings. Instead they deliberately left identified vulnerabilities and malware and placed huge swathes of the U.S. population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals.
Whether or not we are watching a mini civil war among competing factions of the Deep State, one of the more explosive claims has already had major political ramifications in the U.S.
The political attacks on the Trump administration by Democrats and their allies in the media and intelligence community relied on “anonymous CIA sources.” Those sources claimed to see Russian fingerprints in the phishing attack of John Podesta’s email.
However, that evidence-free narrative was greatly undercut last week by leaked CIA documents describing a false flag program called “UMBRAGE.” It was designed to allow the CIA to routinely appear as if they were hackers operating out of Russia.
After a steady drumbeat of breathless reporting about the Russians “hacking” the U.S. election, the CIA’s UMBRAGE leak is drawing some attention. Commentator Bill Mitchell captured many people’s reaction to the news of the CIA’s false flag cyber program with this tweet:
Do you remember the disclosure of a quarter million diplomatic cables by Army Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning in 2010?
Or the hundreds of thousands of documents released by the National Security Agency’s Edward Snowden in 2013?
Well, the …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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