Gadgetory

recently released documents revealed that the CIA can hack into any iOS or Android device but it gets even worse than that WikiLeaks has revealed an information set being called vault 7 and the vault 7 is a huge trove of CIA spying documents revealing the full scope of what the organization is capable of now we've known for a long time that the NSA has access to much more personal information than most of us want but recently suggests that the CIA has the ability to turn any Android iOS windows or even samsung tv device into a covert microphone listening in on practically anything you say anywhere anytime now I know what some of you are thinking you're thinking Jace come on there's no news here you've had many shows in the past talking about how privacy is dead where's the news well the news is that although Edward Snowden did put a big spotlight on the NSA especially the NSA is bound by certain US laws because they operate largely within the u.s. that the CIA is not bound by the CIA does not have to play by the same rules as the NSA does the CIA is responsible for spying and espionage and gathering intent intelligence from outside the u.s. not inside the u.s. so they can do largely what they want and they are saying that they have 24 zero day vulnerabilities what is that well it is not any bloody good let me tell you and Gary help me understand this I'll share it with you now generally the practice is that when someone finds a vulnerability in an operating system for example the general practice is to give Google Apple Windows or whoever 30 days to close that vulnerability to make it safe for the users like you and me after 30 days they can share that publicly because hopefully if the company has been responsible they have closed that vulnerability but a zero-day vulnerability is something that someone knows but they've not shared with Google app or Windows whoever so it's still vulnerable and they have the power to expose it for their own nefarious means the CIA is saying that they have 24 zero day vulnerabilities for Android this allows the CIA to bypass the end-to-end encryption apps like whatsapp signal telegram Weibo can find collecting the message data sent through the device before the encryption was applied to those messages this essentially allows all information input by the user to be collected by the CIA meaning there is no hiding information even when using apps that were thought to once be secured but I said in the intro it gets worse and it does in the words of Edward Snowden why is this dangerous because until closed any hacker can use the security hole the CIA left open to break into any phone in the world and perhaps the most frustrating thing is that there is very little you and I can do about it what are we gonna do stop using anything with an IP address not very practical Wow now as much as that angers me I do not want to sensationalize this I want to be very careful and clarify that for the average person they are not listening to your phone calls they are not monitoring you in your bedroom monitoring your personal texts what they are doing likely is gathering all of our data everyone's everywhere all the time and then they have programs to mine that data and look for flagged information little bits of red flags that should bring about more investigation so if there is something you've done in your background or your history or family or whatever that piques their interest that suggests that you might be doing something they want to know about then they might investigate you further but I don't want to scare anybody in thinking that right now someone is listening to you on your phone they don't have enough people in the CIA to monitor everyone with a phone they have programs to do that through data mining let me know how this makes you feel what would you want to do about it and come on guys you got to be practical about it you're not gonna stop using your phone you're not going to stop using the it's not gonna happen I mean an IP address is in freaking everything you can't avoid it there would have to be intense pressure on our political leaders to not only change this but to set up watchdog organizations to ensure that things are transparent and when they are transparent or there's something happens where someone has overstepped their bounds and uses technology for nefarious means that we have mechanisms in place to fix that that's a lot I don't see it happening anytime soon we're gonna have to build this whole thing up from scratch now if you are a developer or an aspiring developer code is your world you create it tweak it and lovingly obsess over it so picking the right repository management tool is super important that's why our sponsor at Atlassian created bitbucket bitbucket is the git solution for professional teams helping over 5 million developers build with a purpose bitbucket gives teams of all sizes free private repositories with state-of-the-art features like the 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