Wikileaks Reveals CIA Has Tools To Investigate Through Your Wi-Fi Routers

Your Wi-Fi router sitting in the corner of your home accumulating dust and unpatched security flaws, provides an attractive target for hackers. The new information revealed by Wikileaks has shown that Hundreds of commercial Wi-Fi routers are, or were, easily hackable by the CIA.

For the past four months, WikiLeaks has been slowly publishing a series of documents that describe the large amount of hacking tools, which the anti-secrecy organization says belong to the US Central Intelligence Agency. The latest release, published June 15, is a batch of documents describing tools that can be used to hack home wifi routers.


The confidential US government documents describe the Cherry Blossom project, which is the framework by which CIA operatives can subvert wireless routers; install software that harvests email addresses, chat usernames, MAC addresses and VoIP numbers; and allow man-in-the-middle attacks and browser redirection.

Cherry Blossom, or at least version 5 of it, allows agents to infect both wireless and wired access points by installing a firmware upgrade dubbed FlyTrap that can be put on the device without needing physical access to it.

Flytrap can monitor Internet traffic through the router, the web browser redirects the connection to websites that the CIA wants target to see, proxy the network connection of the target, and cut and copy the data traffic. Returns an order and control system called Cherry Trees.

Based on the information disclosed, there are 25 different types of devices which are vulnerable to CIA, with 10 different manufacturers. It is possible that other brands and other router models are also vulnerable to this attack.

The list of manufacturers includes the following manufacturers: Apple, Asus, Belkin, Buffalo, Dell, Dlink, Linksys, Motorola, Netgear, Senao and US Robotics. It is not known whether other trademarks have since been added to the list after these documents have been created.


Router failures are well known and increasingly simple to exploit, making it one of the preferred targets for these type of attacks. It is not known whether these failures are still being actively exploited or whether the CIA has advanced to new tools. What is known is that updates must be released to correct these faults and they must be applied quickly simply to remain safe.

So, what do you think about this new exploit? Simply share your views and thoughts in the comments section below.