Wikileaks has made it abundantly clear that it is in possession of documents that contain inside details about exploits affecting a slew of major companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. A week or so ago, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that he will share information about the said vulnerabilities with the tech companies.
Now though, it appears as if there are certain strings attached with the promise.
Last week, Wikileaks had tweeted:
WikiLeaks has contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla & MicroTik to help protect users against CIA malware.
Ref https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1
Assange had also reiterated his organization’s commitment to working with the affected organizations in a bid to help them secure their users against the likes of CIA. Apparently, Wikileaks has made contact with the organizations that could be affected by the hacks however, it has pushed out a contract with a bunch of unknown conditions.
Well, what could the contract be hiding? Lifetime free subscription to Office 365? The promise to ship Julian Assange out of UK hidden in the next consignment of iPhones? Jokes apart though, it is very unlikely that the highly secret organization will disclose whatever advantages it wants these tech behemoths to confer upon it in return for disclosing the potential backdoors into their systems.
Meanwhile, the companies in question appeared to be fairly confident with regards to the leaks disclosed by Wikileaks. For example, Google said:
As we’ve reviewed the documents, we’re confident that security updates and protections in both Chrome and Android already shield users from many of these alleged vulnerabilities.
Apple released a statement that was along much the same lines.
many of the issues leaked… were already patched in the latest iOS.
However, the wording of the statements are not particularly confident inducing. Why wouldn’t the companies go out and say that all of the vulnerabilities in question had been resolved. Although, the vulnerabilities revealed do not appear to be quite that earth shattering either, considering that both Apple and Google are taking them in their stride.
Let’s wait for another statement from these companies.
