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posted by takyon on Tuesday March 07 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the year-zero dept.

The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks said Tuesday that it has obtained a vast portion of the CIA's computer hacking arsenal, and began posting the files online in a breach that may expose some of the U.S. intelligence community's most closely guarded cyber weapons.

A statement from WikiLeaks indicated that it planned to post nearly 9,000 files describing code developed in secret by the CIA to steal data from targets overseas and turn ordinary devices including cellphones, computers and even television sets into surveillance tools.

The hacking organisation made the statement as it announced a huge release of confidential documents from the CIA as part of its mysterious Year Zero series, founder Julian Assange claimed. The group said that from October 2014 the CIA was "looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks" to enable them to "engage in nearly undetectable assassinations."

takyon: WikiLeaks: Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed and (selected document) Weeping Angel (Extending) Engineering Notes. Also at NYT, USA Today, BBC, and Reuters. The Hill reports that Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu has called for an investigation... into the leak of the documents and tools.


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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:47AM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday March 08 2017, @05:47AM (#476348)

    Note that the probability of death is about 10 in a 1000 for an American 60 year old. Say there are 1000 senior russian diplomats (about 100 countries in the world, so probably reasonable estimate); say they have lifestyle roughly equivalent to average American, i.e. comfortable but sedentary, with a bit more food and drink than is healthy; then we expect about 10 Russian diplomats to die per annum. Here we have 7 deaths in a 5 month period. Assuming binomial distribution one can calculate that the probability of this being natural death is about 6 %.

    There is probably a selection bias, in that likely the article authors selected a particular time window and averaged over that window in order to emphasise the statistical anomaly (so, for example, there may have been no deaths in the prior 6 months). So this is likely an underestimate of the probability.

    I'm sure either the CIA or the FSB will be doing the analysis properly. But likely not both.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:36AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:36AM (#476359) Journal

    Assuming binomial distribution one can calculate that the probability of this being natural death is about 6 %.

    I think one should use the Poisson distribution for estimating the probability - its history include [wikipedia.org] "investigating the number of soldiers in the Prussian army killed accidentally by horse kicks".

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