Theft of CIA hacking tools spotlights the spy agency’s “lax†security
A lawmaker says intelligence agencies should be subject to the same standards as the rest of the government.
by
Patrick Howell O'Neill archive page
June 16, 2020
American intelligence agencies are still falling short on security, years after high-profile data leaks from Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Joshua Schulte, according to a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee. In a letter to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Senator Ron Wyden uses a 2017 internal report from the CIA to detail the ways in which the intelligence community has continuously failed to protect itself.
“The intelligence community is still lagging behind and has failed to adopt even the most basic cybersecurity technologies in widespread use elsewhere in the federal government,†Wyden writes.
The report, which was obtained in redacted form by the Washington Post, details how the agency's elite hacking unit favored building offensive cyber weapons while it failed to secure some of its most important systems, a pattern that led to the 2016 theft of hacking tools that were then published by WikiLeaks under the name “Vault 7.†American officials said it was the largest data loss in CIA history.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/16/1003738/theft-of-cia-hacking-tools-spotlights-spy-agencys-lax-security/
