By Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris
The Washington Post
June 16, 2020
The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.
The breach — allegedly by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release “Vault 7,” and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA’s history, causing the agency to shut down some intelligence operations and alerting foreign adversaries to the spy agency’s techniques.
The October 2017 report by the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force, several pages of which were missing or redacted, portrays an agency more concerned with bulking up its cyber arsenal than keeping those tools secure. Security procedures were “woefully lax” within the special unit that designed and built the tools, the report said.
Absent WikiLeaks’s disclosure, the CIA might never have known the tools had been stolen, according to the report. “Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss,” the task force concluded.
[…]
WTF is going on !!! TOTAL FAIL !!!
without wikileaks the cia would never have never known – just sick of this shit!
UPDATE
The Cyber Budget Shows What the U.S. Values—And It Isn’t Defense
https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values%E2%80%94and-it-isnt-defense
The stated priorities seem clear as the last three presidents have stated that the U.S. is vulnerable and must have a strong defense. But sometimes analysts have to follow the money, to see if the facts match the rhetoric. And by examining the federal cybersecurity budget, it is clear the U.S. government prioritizes the military—a fact with important implications for national security policy.
Stated U.S. Priorities