'Vault 7': Wikileaks Starts New Series of Leaks on CIA

It is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the CIA, Wikileaks said in a press release.

"The quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one ("Year Zero") already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks."

The first part of the leaks dubbed "Year Zero" comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina.

"Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive," Wikileaks stated.

"Year Zero" leaks reveals the scope and direction of the US intelligence agency's "global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones."

Wikileaks said that since 2001, the CIA "has gained political and budgetary preeminence" over the National Security Agency (NSA). The whistleblowing site said that the agency built a "globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers." Moreover, the agency's hacking division is anot allowed to disclose its operations to the NSA.

"The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified."

Wikileaks stated citing the source of the leaks that "Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike."