The CIA Didn't Tell Google And Apple About Backdoor Hacks Into Their Products

WikiLeaks, the organization infamously responsible for revealing U.S. war crimes and surveillance abuses, released over 8,000 pages of documents Tuesday outlining a CIA surveillance program focused on hacking consumer products.

The documents reveal multiple surveillance and cyber warfare operations, including a special CIA unit designed to crack open Apple Inc. AAPL’s iPhone operating system.

A WikiLeaks press release stated that “despite iPhone's minority share (14.5 percent) of the global smartphone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads.”

A unit was also set up to infiltrate Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL’s Android smartphone operating system, which controls far more market share than the iPhone.

WikiLeaks speculated that “the disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.”

Surveillance Operations Violate Vulnerable Equities Process

WikiLeaks described the exploits these operations used to gain surveillance access to consumer products as violations of the Vulnerable Equities Process, a commitment the U.S. government made to disclose vulnerabilities in U.S. tech companies’ products. The WikiLeaks release also said that intelligence community leaks made it possible for these backdoor hacks to spread to non-government operators.

“As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in ‘Year Zero’ is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts,” the WikiLeaks release said. “The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities (‘zero days’) possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.”

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