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19/06/2020 | US - Lax security behind greatest data loss in CIA’s history, internal report concludes

Joseph Fitsanakis

Complacency and substandard security by the United States Central Intelligence Agency were behind the Vault 7 leak of 2017, which ranks as the greatest data loss in the agency’s history, according to an internal report.

 

The Vault 7 data loss was particularly shocking, given that the CIA should have taken precautions following numerous leaks of classified government information in years prior to 2017, according to the report.

The Vault 7 data leak occurred in the first half of 2017, when the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks began publishing a series of technical documents belonging to the CIA. Once all documents had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks website, they amounted to 34 terabytes of information, which is equivalent to 2.2 billion pages of text. The information contained in the Vault 7 leak is believed to constitute the biggest leak of classified data in the history of the CIA.

The Vault 7 documents reveal the capabilities and operational details of some of the CIA’s cyber espionage arsenal. They detail nearly 100 different software tools that the agency developed and used between 2013 and 2016, in order to compromise targeted computers, computer servers, smartphones, cars, televisions, internet browsers, operating systems, etc. In 2017 the US government accused Joshua Adam Schulte, a former CIA software engineer, of giving the Vault 7 data to WikiLeaks. Schulte’s trial by jury was inconclusive, and a re-trial is believed to be in the works.

Now an internal report into the Vault 7 disclosure has been made public. The report was compiled by the CIA WikiLeaks Task Force, which the agency set up with the two-fold mission of assessing the damage from the leak and recommending security procedures designed to prevent similar leaks from occurring in the future. A heavily redacted copy of the report has been made available [.pdf] by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) who is a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An analysis of the report was published on Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The report recognizes that insider threats —a data leak perpetrated on purpose by a conscious and determined employee, or a group of employees— are especially difficult to stop. It adds, however, that the Vault 7 leak was made easier by “a culture of shadow IT” in which the CIA’s various units developed distinct IT security practices and their own widely different systems of safeguarding data. Many cyber units prioritized creative, out-of-the-box thinking, in order to develop cutting-edge cyber-tools. But they spent hardly any time thinking of ways to safeguard the secrecy of their projects, and failed to develop even basic counterintelligence standards —for instance keeping a log of which of their members had access to specific parts of the data— according to the report.

Such standards should have been prioritized, the report adds, given the numerous high-profile leaks that rocked the Intelligence Community in the years prior to the Vault 7 disclosure. It mentions the examples of Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, who defected to Russia, as well as Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst for the US Army, who gave government secrets to WikiLeaks. Manning spent time in prison before being pardoned by President Barack Obama. Snowden remains in hiding in Russia.

The CIA has not commented on the release of the internal Vault 7 report. An agency spokesman, Timothy Barrett, told The New York Times that the CIA was committed to incorporating “best-in-class technologies to keep ahead of and defend against ever-evolving threats”. In a letter accompanying the release of the report, Senator Wyden warned that “the lax cybersecurity practices documented in the CIA’s WikiLeaks task force report do not appear limited to just one part of the intelligence community”.

Intelnews.org (Estados Unidos)

 



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