CIA hackers found a means to get into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages instantly, before the transmission might be encoded by the apps sending them, based on the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence professionals have linked the spike to general worry between activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump might use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to target them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to stress the extent to which messaging apps they believed secure may not be over.

But Moxie Marlinspike, creator 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 must 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 must be very selective. I think that’s a good thing.”
Because end-to-end encryption means that 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 according to the leaked documents, the CIA seems to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers which get access to a device’s operating system might be able to record calls and messages in real time, 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 suggested that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like WhatsApp and Signal to do so.
“The worst thing which may 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 this story is that the documents confirm the CIA holds on to security vulnerabilities in software and devices ” including Android phones, iPhones and Samsung television – that millions of people round the world rely on.”
It was not immediately clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that 24 such vulnerabilities were included by the data for Android devices alone. The data dump included a comprehensive list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Apple and Android devices, including several mentions of malicious software the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to hand over information about vulnerabilities and zero days it discovers. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
The agreement has been long denounced by critics 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.
The CIA cache seems to validate these concerns, experts point to a need for greater information sharing between government agencies and tech companies, and said.
“If there’s a vulnerability in the wild and it is 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.”
For more details about iphone spyware explore this popular net page: look at this