WikiLeaks offers to help shield technology firms

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

WikiLeaks will work with technology companies to help defend them against the CIA’s hacking tools, founder Julian Assange said Thursday. The move sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an intelligence agency stung by the radical transparency group’s disclosures.

In an online news conference, Assange said some companies had asked for more details about the purported CIA cyberespionage toolkit that he revealed in a massive disclosure Tuesday.

“We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to the additional technical details we have, so that fixes can be developed and pushed out,” Assange said. The digital blueprints for what he described as “cyberweapons” would be published to the world “once this material is effectively disarmed by us.”

The CIA did not respond directly to Assange’s offer, but it appeared to take a dim view of the announcement.

“As we’ve said previously, Julian Assange is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity,” CIA spokeswoman Heather Fritz Horniak said, adding that the CIA’s work would continue “despite the efforts of Assange and his ilk.”

Assange had plenty of criticism for the agency himself, blasting it for having lost control of its “entire cyberweapons arsenal,” something he described as “a historic act of devastating incompetence.”

The fate of that alleged arsenal is unclear. WikiLeaks has not released the actual digital espionage tools themselves, just documentation related to them that describe in various levels of detail how the CIA bypasses anti-viruses, hacks into smartphones and even hijacks smart TVs. Assange has not explicitly said how he knows that the arsenal is circulating or even that he has a full copy.

Assange did offer some hints, suggesting that spies, former intelligence officials and contractors had been sharing the cyberespionage tools behind the CIA’s back – potentially to feed the for-profit market in spy software.

“WikiLeaks discovered the material as a result of it being passed around a number of different members of the U.S. intelligence community, out of control, in an unauthorized fashion,” Assange said. “It looks like not only is that material being spread around contractors and former American computer hackers for hire, but now may be in the black market.”

If true, that would be a serious concern for ordinary internet users because the purported CIA trove could provide a “buffet of bugs for low-end hackers to draw upon,” said Steven Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who has long studied cybersecurity issues.

That’s already worrying senior law-enforcement figures such as Europol chief Rob Wainwright, who said the aftershocks of the alleged breach could go way beyond the CIA.

“There is a potential here for a much more widespread impact in the way that it might fuel an increase in cybercriminal activity,” he told The Associated Press.