News Item
Homeland Security Today: "CIA’s Covert Cyber Spy Office Rocked by Leak on its Hacking Tools"
Photo: The C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. If the WikiLeaks documents are authentic, the release would be a serious blow to the agency. Credit Jason Reed/Reuters
. . . “By putting these tools into the public domain, WikiLeaks has done the equivalent to handing lighter fluid and matches to children,” said James W. Gabberty, associate dean and professor of information systems at Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems in New York City.
“The potential damage done to the United States - both from a military and personal safety perspective - resulting from WikiLeaks’ transmittal of thousands upon thousands of program codes stolen by hacktivists puts us all in danger, as now our enemies possess the greatest weapon possible to inflict harm to us: the keys to the kingdom,” Gabberty said. “One can only imagine the sophistication of the tools developed by our clandestine agencies and now leaked by WikiLeaks.”
“What this means to the casual reader,” Gabberty explained, “is our most advanced network data collection tools have been made public to everyone on earth, and anyone using them has the capability to access just about any network on earth. The resulting hacking activity that will ensue will be like nothing we’ve seen to date. For those of us living in the northeast, recall how easy a simple software bug led to the northeast blackout of 2003. Image having tools that were specifically designed to allow attackers to gain access to these same computers with aplomb and the subsequent damage that could be done … As the Internet of Things (IoT) promises billions of interconnected devices, the collective vulnerability of these devices becomes painfully evident.”
“Now that WikiLeaks has unleashed the potentially most damaging cyber security tools ever to hit the street,” he continued, “I wonder if supporters of Army private Chelsea Manning and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden will continue to cheer when the electricity powering their computing digital devices, ATMs, cellular networks and mass transportation systems stops flowing … we are in the midst of a massive cyber war that is increasing both in its ferocity and frequency, and everything from our research centers, financial, military and civilian infrastructures are at risk of being compromised and used against us.”
The problem, he added, is, “The United States, it turns out, still does not have a public policy on how to best safeguard our information assets; we simply hobble along, taking the best advice from this framework or that, and watch in dismay as our systems are constantly overwhelmed by attackers.”
