Vault7 — CIA Hacking Tools Revealed

Another big data leak was revealed by WikiLeaks this week, this time it’s called “Vault7—CIA Hacking Tools Revealed”. And, well, it does, in fact, confirm the worst fears privacy researchers had: The CIA is spying on Samsung TVs, and it’s extremely likely that Amazon’s Alexa is no exception, just like a lot of other centralized, not end-to-end-encrypted services, too. The findings also caused a lot of discussion about whether messaging apps like Whatsapp and Signal are safe since their encryption was reportedly broken as well. But you need to differentiate here, because, in the case of the messaging apps, the encryption was broken by infecting only selected targeted devices with malware. Together with this news about decrypted PGP messages, the published data shows that apps like Signal do indeed work as expected: They prevent third parties from mass-capturing private data and instead force them to target individual devices.