Europe WikiLeaks publishes trove purportedly taken from CIA
Source: Washington Post
PARIS — WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to provide an eye-opening look at the intimate details of America’s cyberespionage toolkit.
The dump of more than 8,000 documents could not immediately be authenticated by The Associated Press and the CIA declined comment, but WikiLeaks has a long track record of releasing top secret government documents. Experts who’ve started to sift through the material said it appeared legitimate — and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.
...
Bob Ayers, a retired U.S. intelligence official currently working as a security analyst, agreed, saying that the release was “real bad” for the agency.
If the authenticity of the dump were officially confirmed, it would represent yet another catastrophic breach for the U.S. intelligence community at the hands of WikiLeaks and its allies, which have repeatedly humbled Washington with the mass release of classified material, including hundreds of thousands of documents from the State Department and the Pentagon.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/wikileaks-publish-1000s-of-what-it-says-are-cia-documents/2017/03/07/532f3a7a-0341-11e7-9d14-9724d48f5666_story.html
Just what we need. More deflection and more 'news' overload.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and it's amazing that they would denigrate and destroy the tools they have and will definitely need in the future just for a short term gain. 
Tl;dr: "When signaturing [malware] tools, string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The US government writes malware targeting Windows (and Mac, and *nix etc etc etc) and attempts to hide where that malware actually came from (because privacy and security, with no irony at all intended whatsoever). Nothing at all new there, been done for years and more likely decades, but it should still piss you off because....
.... well. I'll leave it to you to decide if the black market price for the tools themselves is high enough to overcome a developer's patriotism enough that they would sell the tool stripped of its signatures, so that the "newly-discovered-in-the-wild" malware doesn't blow the authoring shop's cover after the sale.
A vulnerability is a vulnerability is a vulnerability. Once it is discovered (or reverse-engineered, in the case of a false/compromised DLL), it's just malware in the wild, same as all the rest and available to everyone who knows how to use it.
Maybe our government shouldn't write malware that targets specific DLLs of OSes known for their vulnerability to malware for that exact reason, that it just perpetuates a shitty cycle, but now parts of that cycle are being (unintentionally, but for the theorized sale) contributed by government employees
