The IT Nerd

Yesterday, WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell about the CIA’s abilities in terms of hacking everything from phones to smart TVs. So, is this a story about those abilities? That’s what it’s become, but it shouldn’t be. Instead here’s the real story. Actually, there’s two things that you need to pay attention to:

1. What this data dump shows is that the CIA found bugs in everything from smart TVs to your iPhone and didn’t inform the people who made those products about those bugs in the interest of exploiting them for their own purposes. Thus, they put users of those products at risk from criminals who if they didn’t know anything about these bugs before, they do now and are exploiting them as I type this. And to be frank, I am much more worried about the criminals than the spies as the latter has some degree of oversight. Apple, Google, and everyone else who makes a IoT device or a smart phone will fix bugs that are brought to their attention as they don’t have an interest in making devices that are insecure. But they weren’t given that opportunity. Now, I do understand that the CIA among other intelligence agencies have a job to do. But I don’t think that job should be done at the expense of the safety of the public at large. That I believe needs to change.
2. People are concerned because supposedly secure apps like Signal and WhatsApp are insecure. That isn’t true though. From what I can tell, they were able to pwn the phone and intercept things before they were encrypted. Thus the apps are fine but the OS of your smart phone may not be. So the discussion needs to change to hardening the phones operating systems so that this cannot happen. You as a user have a role to play in that by always applying updates to not only the phone’s OS, but to the apps that you use. That way, you mitigate, but not eliminate, the chance that this could be a risk to you. Having said that, this is a clear signal to the Apple and Googles of the world that they need to up their game as well.

Keep in mind that we’re going to be revisiting this in the future as this is the first of many data dumps that are to come from WikiLeaks. Plus everyone from casual observers, hackers, to software companies, governments, and terrorist organizations are looking at this data dump as we speak and will be looking at future ones as well. Either way, we’ll have more to discuss and we will have to look beneath the surface to find out what is the real story is as that’s what we really should be focusing on.

This entry was posted on March 8, 2017 at 8:15 am and is filed under Commentary with tags WikiLeaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.