Google addressed the contents of the documents that were recently unveiled by WikiLeaks and gave a lot of alarming insights into the hacking methods of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Heather Adkins, Director of Information Security and Privacy at Google provided Recode with a brief statement reflecting on the recent controversy. Adkins said that she and everyone else at Google believe that the security updates and other protection mechanisms that the Mountain View-based tech giant introduced to Android, Chrome, and its other offerings over the years are sufficient to already protect their users from many exploits and vulnerabilities outlined in the documents that WikiLeaks published. Google’s executive also said that the Alphabet-owned company is still conducting a thorough inspection of the leak and is trying to identify whether it needs to start working on any additional preventive measures and precautions against the CIA’s hacks. Adkins concluded her statement by saying that Google always prioritized the security of its users above everything else and said that the firm’s priorities weren’t affected by the leak, adding that the Mountain View-based company will continue committing significant resources to improving the security of its products and services.
While the aforementioned statement was obviously intended to provide Google’s users with some ease of mind, its vague wording and the fact that Adkins herself admitted that the company’s security measures are only sufficient to protect people against “many,” but not all of the vulnerabilities uncovered by WikiLeaks still warrant some concern. The contents of WikiLeaks’ latest data dump contain over 8,000 documents, some of which are over three years old. The leaked documents uncovered numerous controversial hacking methods that the CIA has been using in recent years and caused a lot of backlash from privacy advocacy groups, as well as other organizations and individuals.
Regardless, the contents of the documents are still being inspected by both journalists and security experts, while cyber security professionals are asking people to not jump to conclusions like some media outlets did by reporting that the CIA managed to compromise a number of popular messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. An update on the situation is expected to follow shortly.