CIA CYBER WEAPONS STOLEN DUE TO LAX SECURITY: INTERNAL REPORT

The largest theft of data from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the result of an overweening desire of a specialized unit to build cyber weapons that an employee took advantage of "woefully lax" security and gave secret hacking tools to WikiLeaks, an internal report said on Tuesday, June 16, 2020.

Hacking tools stolen in the breach, which occurred in 2016, came from its clandestine Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), were not disclosed but could be as much as 34 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 2.2 billion pages of text, Zachary Cohen and Alex Marquardt wrote for CNN.

The theft was revealed around a year later, in March 2017, when WikiLeaks published what it claimed was the largest trove of CIA documents, dubbed "Vault 7," detailing some of the agency's sophisticated cyber weapons, which was first detailed by the Washington Post.

It prompted a review by the CIA WikiLeaks Task Force, which submitted its findings in an October 2017 report to then-Director Mike Pompeo and his deputy -- who is now the director -- Gina Haspel. In a damning admission, its authors write: "We failed to recognize or act in a coordinated fashion on warning signs that a person or persons with access to CIA classified information posed an unacceptable risk to national security." While the CIA declined to comment on any specific report, agency spokesperson Timothy Barrett told CNN, "CIA works to incorporate best-in-class technologies to keep ahead of and defend against ever-evolving threats."