I am excited that, after long months of nothing too relevant being published, Wikileaks finally put another nail in the coffin of the corrupt and manipulative government. After all, it was them that showed us the incriminating documents against the Democratic Party.

Although I am not surprised, this does frighten me based on what the government has done in the past. In fact, today Edward Snowden claimed the documents were a "genuinely big deal" and that it "looks authentic".

The fact that our government does this is truly scary and will hopefully come to an end. However, I believe the new administration will only expand CIA powers.

I'd warn all Bitcoin users to refrain from using online wallets because, no matter how trustworthy, it seems the government may be able to do what ever they'd like.
Especially seeing as how the government is in almost 20 trillion dollars of debt, I wouldn't be surprised if sooner or later the government tried to steal all our 401ks and retirement/education savings. And, if that's not enough, they may steal from companies like PayPal and perhaps will attempt to take from Bitcoin. After all, there are billions of dollars worth of Bitcoins.

If that doesn't happen, we've seen how stupid the government can be when handling classified material (ex. DNC) so how hard does anyone think it'd be to get into the governments own stolen malware documents and begin to rob everyone of our money?

i think malware on phones is going to be a massive problem going forward
especially with the increase in "mobile" devices and how people use them
for their financial accounting/general banking. its constantly in the back of
my mind when i use the banking app on my phone.

"whats going on in the background........"

even more reason to have a stand alone isolated laptop, netbook or PC
for sensitive material and BTC

the future is bright scary,
but shure if a fella has feck all there is feck all to be stolen.....

Saw this available on a torrent site yesterday and it was password protected until March 6, yesterday when it would be revealed to open the 7zip file.

Best practices are using exactly whatever security methods we've been using so far. There's no practical way of protecting ourselves from unknown exploits...


Beyond scary... I don't think this will end in our lifetimes.


These wallets would get drained by hackers before anything else, I don't think the government is a issue or a threat here.


Indeed, experience tells us that governments only tend to their needs.


Didn't understand the reference, but I guess this is it. Maybe the CIA wants to "vault" the whole world who uses IT...

Use a device with no closed source software, because that's where they hide the 'backdoors'. That includes all the firmware, drivers etc as well as the OS.

Check these guys out: https://minifree.org/

I would love to know how much time and effort they have spent on trying to crack bitcoin.
Can you imagine if they had leaked that they had a back door into Bitcoin? I would expect a $900 drop if that happened!

I guess that Bitcoin wasn't mentioned is a good thing, they haven't cracked it yet.

But perhaps there is potential for your coins to be stolen. One of the main parts of this latest revelation from Wikileaks is not just that the CIA is doing this, but that they lost control of all the hacking tools they collected and built which then fell into other hands - potentially the hands of criminals.

The real problem now is not that a handful of professionals in the CIA had these tools... it's that the tools are out in the wild. Anyone could have them, or be in the process of getting them. Simply knowing the sorts of things that can successfully be done may be enough to inspire other hackers to recreate tools with the same functionality.

That's the real risk I see to online wallets and anything else protected with a password (encryption notwithstanding, if you've read the news).

I can allay your fears on one point - don't worry about the government crassly stealing your funds. So long as they can simply inflate the dollar (or other centrally managed currency), there is absolutely no need for them to stoop to such a level even in a crisis. It would only be counterproductive for them to do so, when they can simply invisibly pilfer the value of everyone's funds everywhere by issuing more fiat.

Maybe this is OT if you wanted to stick to bitcoin, but the news that they were developing hacking tools to assassinate people by accelerating and steering their cars off the road scares me rather more than any financial risks. Or perhaps because in the wrong hands it will become both a financial risk and a risk to our lives. Imagine if hackers perform a few of these incidents at random, then start calling anyone (like those "Hello, I'm from Microsoft and you have a virus" phone calls) to claim that they've hacked your vehicle and will steer you into a lamppost at 80 MPH unless you pay them a bitcoin ransom. :-(

And people used to laugh when they saw my laptop camera is covered in tape with black sharpie marker over it.

I think this is positive.  If these weapons are out there, they will eventually also be used against government targets.  As such, there won't be a desire any more by government to keep leaky hardware and software: they've lost their competitive edge that way, and are now part of the victims.  So they will not hamper a cure any more.
It would be fantastic if horrible things happened to the government by their own tools in the hands of enemies.  It would be fantastic if the government felt powerless in the face of their own tools.  Then they will stop pushing for holes in the system (and maybe refrain from developing even more stuff that will eventually be used against them).

The NSA and the CIA have been on the wrong leg all these years (no wonder, they are government agencies).  In stead of being on the defensive side, and helping the population, companies and so on, to develop secure, tight systems, they have been lobbying for holes everywhere, so that they could develop their offensive capacity.  But now they are themselves full of holes, and the enemies have their weapons ; and they have equipped their citizens also with equipment full of holes, open to the attacks by their own tools in the hands of enemies.   They have rendered the government, and the entire population and economy, fully vulnerable to foreign attacks, with tax money.