(Jack Burns) Last week, Wikileaks dumped what seems to be authentic CIA documents which revealed, among other things, that the spy agency has a way of hacking into smart TV’s in order to spy on targeted persons of interest. The data dump, known as the Vault 7 release, also showed the CIA has the ability to hack into Apple phones as well. While the conjugation of the verb is apparently incorrect, when Buzzfeed News recently posted a tweet with an attached story which stated Apple had patched its IOS vulnerabilities described in Vault 7, Wikileaks responded with a tweet of its own.
by Jack Burns, March 13th, 2017
The agency, committed to forcing governments to operate with transparency, called Buzzfeed “fakenews” and stated Apple had not been able to patch those weaknesses in its operating system.
In Buzzfeed’s own article Apple states: “…our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS…” — not all the issues, as Buzzfeed implied.
At one point, the FBI admitted it had not developed the capability to get into the Apple IOS. Readers may recall James Comey had actually petitioned Congress to force Apple to cooperate with the FBI and help the investigative bureau unlock one of the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhones. Then, abruptly, Comey withdrew his request to mandate Apple to cooperate. As a result, those who were following the story began to speculate the FBI had found another way to get inside the phone…