Wikileaks Vault 7: CIA backdoored software updates to spy on allies

Another embarrassment for US intelligence dished up by Wikileaks

Wikileaks latest Vault 7 disclosures suggest that the CIA has forced partner organisations in the US and overseas to adopt a software update when dealing with them - or face the consequences.

And anyone resisting the charms of the CIA and its update would find, without actually realising it, that the CIA has also built-in a kill switch that terminates software, encouraging a reinstall, presumably one with a backdoor.

Wikileaks claims that the project is called ExpressLane and has the ability to suck-up biometric information from phones.

Wikileaks doesn't speculate what the CIA was after, in particular, or who it wanted it from and what it did with it. But the organisation claims that the program was used against US agencies, like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

Wikileaks released the documentation as part of its Vault 7 program.

"WikiLeaks publishes secret documents from the ExpressLane project of the CIA. These documents show one of the cyber operations the CIA conducts against liaison services - which includes among many others the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)," explained Wikileaks in its latest release.

"The OTS (Office of Technical Services), a branch within the CIA, has a biometric collection system that is provided to liaison services around the world - with the expectation for sharing of the biometric takes collected on the systems.

"But this 'voluntary sharing' obviously does not work or is considered insufficient by the CIA, because ExpressLane is a covert information collection tool that is used by the CIA to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services."