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The CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), which developed cyber tools for foreign intelligence operations, stored those tools on a specialized mission system that lacked basic safeguards, according to an internal review dated October 2017. The theft was attributed to 2016, but the agency learned of it only after WikiLeaks began publishing Vault 7 material in March 2017. The review could not establish exactly how much data was taken.
What the CIA task force said went wrong
The CIA WikiLeaks Task Force found shortcomings in the specialized CCI mission system that held the tools. The Washington Post reported that the review said safeguards had been slow to arrive despite earlier breaches at other U.S. government agencies. The task force wrote: “CIA has moved too slowly to put in place the safeguards that we knew were necessary given successive breaches to other U.S. Government agencies.” (The Washington Post, June 15, 2020)
Access controls and removable media
Among the problems reported were sensitive tools that were not compartmented, shared system-administrator passwords, ineffective controls on removable media, and users retaining indefinite access to historical data. Together, these weaknesses could make it easier for someone with access to reach or copy material beyond what they needed for their work. The report’s findings concern this particular mission system, not every CIA computer network.
Monitoring and detection
The system lacked effective monitoring of who used it. As a result, investigators could not determine the precise scope of the loss. The task force said the agency might still have been unaware of the theft if the material had been taken for a state adversary and not published publicly. (The Washington Post; Associated Press via Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2020)
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When the theft happened—and when it was discovered
Reporting on the task force review places the theft in 2016. The CIA learned of the loss only after WikiLeaks began publishing Vault 7 material in March 2017. The agency’s October 2017 review came months after that public disclosure.
- 2016: The theft occurred, according to reporting on the task force review.
- March 2017: WikiLeaks began publishing Vault 7 material. On March 8, the CIA said it had “no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents.” (CIA statement, March 8, 2017)
- October 2017: The CIA WikiLeaks Task Force dated its review of the loss.
- February 2024: The Associated Press reported that former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte had been sentenced to 40 years after convictions tied in part to the disclosure of CIA secrets and to separate crimes. (Associated Press, February 1, 2024)
How much data was taken?
The precise amount remains unknown in the reporting. The task force estimated the loss at at least 180 gigabytes and as much as 34 terabytes, a range reported by the Associated Press in 2020—not a confirmed total. The AP also gave an equivalent range of 11.6 million to 2.2 billion Microsoft Word pages. The wide spread reflects the review’s inability to determine the exact scope, a problem compounded by inadequate activity monitoring and a redacted or incomplete copy of the report described by The Washington Post. (Associated Press via Los Angeles Times; Axios, June 17, 2020; The Washington Post)
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The task force also reported that WikiLeaks published comprehensive descriptions of 35 tools. That figure describes the tools covered by those published descriptions; it should not be read as the total number of tools held by the CIA. (Associated Press via Los Angeles Times)
What Vault 7 does—and does not—establish
Vault 7 is WikiLeaks’ name for the material it published and attributed to the CIA. The agency’s March 2017 statement expressly declined to authenticate the purported documents, so the published contents should not be presented as independently confirmed CIA records. The task force’s internal findings, by contrast, are findings described in press reporting about its review.
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The disclosures also did not establish that the CIA had “broken the internet.” A contemporaneous Council on Foreign Relations explainer answered that question “no” and said the material did not show that the agency had broken or bypassed encrypted messaging apps such as Signal or WhatsApp. That was expert analysis of the 2017 disclosures, not an official CIA statement or a comprehensive technical audit. (Council on Foreign Relations, March 8, 2017)
The mission network was not all CIA IT
The security failures in the task force reporting applied to the specialized CCI mission system. The Washington Post also reported that an unnamed former official disputed the characterization that CIA personnel did not care about security, while agreeing with many of the task force’s findings. That former official said the mission systems were separate from enterprise systems and described the CIA as an early leader in securing its enterprise environment. CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett said the agency works to incorporate “best-in-class technologies to keep ahead of and defend against ever-evolving threats.” These qualifications do not erase the reported weaknesses in the system at the center of the incident, but they matter when distinguishing that system from the agency’s wider IT environment. (The Washington Post)
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Why the incident mattered
The case exposed two different failures: preventing unauthorized access and detecting it afterward. Shared administrator passwords, weak removable-media controls, un-compartmented tools, and indefinite access to historical data undermined prevention. Limited monitoring left the agency unable to say precisely what had been taken—and, according to the task force, publication may have been what alerted it to the loss at all. The central lesson is not that every CIA system had the same weaknesses, but that a highly sensitive mission system could hold valuable tools without reliable access controls or visibility into their use.
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