CIA hackers discovered a means to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages immediately, before the conversation may be encoded by the apps sending them, according to the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps similar to Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence specialists have assigned the spike to general worry among activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump could use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to aim for them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to fret over the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be.

But Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems, said, if anything, the data show that apps and Signal like it are working.
“End-to-end encryption has pushed intelligence agencies from unfettered access to mass surveillance to a world where they need to use expensive, high-risk, targeted attacks against individuals to gain access to their information,” he said. “If you use these kinds of attacks on a massive scale, it increases the danger of detection. So to break into people’s phones and get access to encrypted messages, these agencies now need to be very selective. I think that’s a good thing.”
Because end-to-end encryption means that only the people engaged in a conversation have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they’re sharing would be unable to understand it without the key.
But as stated by the leaked documents, the CIA seems to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking. Hackers that get access to a device’s operating system may manage to record calls and messages immediately, as a person is speaking into their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you have malware on an operating-system level, you can record keystrokes as they’re being typed,” said Jeremiah Grossman, SentinelOne’s chief of security strategy.
Security experts encouraged that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing which can happen is for users to lose faith in encryption-enabled tools and stop using them,” wrote Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The dark side of the story is that the documents confirm that the CIA holds on to security vulnerabilities in software and devices ” including Android phones, iPhones and Samsung television – that millions of people around the world rely on.”
It wasn’t straight clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that the data included 24 such vulnerabilities for Android devices. The data dump covered a comprehensive list of attacks the CIA had used to gain access to Android and Apple devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to hand over information about zero days it discovers and vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
For being opaque and difficult to enforce, while still allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that may compromise millions of devices to itself, critics have long denounced the agreement.
The CIA cache published by WikiLeaks seems to validate these concerns, experts point to a need for greater information sharing between government agencies and tech companies, and said.
“If there is a vulnerability in the wild and it’s not making it into the hands of the vendor so it can be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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