This is nothing new. It has always been understood that if an endpoint is infected with spying malware that encryption is useless.

Lesson here. Always flash your phone back to a known clean factory image. when you get in and then only install apps from F-droid, and don't include the baseband part of the flash cause that is a security nightmare.. which means no cellphonee funtion.. and in many cases. a non-booting phone (which makes it secure BTW :) )

Basically.. expecting you're cell-phone to be Secure is CRAZY unless you control the baseband firmware.

Apps like Signal, etal are ment to stop PASSIVE data collection.. If they are targetting you directly forget about using a smartphone.

Freemor at 2017-03-07T19:22:38Z

But thanks for the heads up.. I'll take a look at the actual release.. News outlets are terrible bad at getting this stuff right, and they are always way to hair-on-fire about stuff.

But I guess that a headline saying.. "Meh, Interesting but nothing new really.." wouldn't get much play.

Freemor at 2017-03-07T19:40:30Z

Aaron Gibson likes this.

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/07/cia-has-an-impressive-list-of-ways-to-hack-into-your-smartphone-wikileaks-files-indicate/

For a more indepth less hyperbolic look

Freemor at 2017-03-07T21:14:43Z