On Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver notes the release by WikiLeaks of a collection of CIA documents obtained through a breach. This caught my eye:
As has been widely reported, this morning Wikileaks released a trove of documents, the first installation (Year Zero) of a series of planned releases it is calling “Vault 7.” According to Wikileaks,
the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
Several hundred million lines of code? That’s … a lot. I work on a very large system, and I’m told it’s not more than 40 million. Maybe they use really bad programmers, which seems doubtful. Nicholas warns that Wikileaks does tend to exaggerate, so perhaps that’s all this might be. But it is breathtaking.
Unless it’s assembly code. Yeah, that’s it – the CIA does its thing in a very inefficient manner.
Nyah.
