The privacy of smartphones has come under doubts after Central Intelligence Agency’s global covert hacking programme has come to the fore.
According to a significant cache of documents released by WikiLeaks, called Vault 7, the hacking programme of CIA had a branch of mobile devices which tapped smartphones to infect and extract data, including a user’s location, audio and text messages, and to covertly activate a phone’s camera and microphone.
Under the hacking programme, CIA had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors. They had produced over a thousand hacking systems. According to the documents, the agency had an array of malware in the software of major companies.
The New York Times reported WikiLeaks as stating that the files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
The most popular smartphone operating systems, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, are targetted by the software.
The documents state that Apple’s iPhone software was a particular target because according to CIA iPhone is popular among social, political diplomatic and business elites.
The hacking system could allow CIA to do away with the security that hindered investigators from gaining access to the password-protected iPhone of one of the attackers in the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Moreover, there was also a programme to take control of Samsung smart television. The programme, code-names Weeping Angel, was intended to convert new digital televisions into “covert microphones”. According to the documents, the malware was developed in cooperation with the British spy agency MI5.
The use of malware to hack into devices has been going on for years.
