With WikiLeaks Claims of C.I.A. Hacking, How Vulnerable Is Your Smartphone?

WikiLeaks on Tuesday released a significant cache of documents that it said came from a high-security network inside the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks called the documents Vault 7, and they lay out the capabilities of the agency’s global covert hacking program.

What is the C.I.A. program?

By the end of 2016, the C.I.A. program had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors. And they had produced more than a thousand hacking systems. The agency’s arsenal, the documents indicate, included an array of malware ranging from viruses to clandestine “zero day” vulnerabilities in the software of major companies.

The files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in “an unauthorized manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” WikiLeaks said.

WikiLeaks said it was publishing the documents while redacting and anonymizing some passages, including the names of “tens of thousands” of C.I.A. targets. WikiLeaks said it was not distributing “armed cyberweapons.”

How vulnerable is my smartphone?

The software targeted by the hacking program included the most popular smartphone operating systems: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

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