Vault 7
series of documents released by WikiLeaks in 2017
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, detailing the activities and capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dating from 2013 to 2016, include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, the operating systems of most smartphones including Apple's iOS and Google's Android, and computer operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. A CIA internal audit identified 91 malware tools out of more than 500 tools in use in 2016 being compromised by the release. The tools were developed by the Operations Support Branch of the CIA.
The Vault 7 release led the CIA to redefine WikiLeaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence service". In July 2022, former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte was convicted of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks, and in February 2024 sentenced to 40 years of imprisonment on espionage counts, and to 80 months (6.6 years) of imprisonment for child pornography counts.
History
In February 2017, WikiLeaks began teasing the release of "Vault 7" with a series of cryptic messages on Twitter (now X), according to media reports. Later on in February, WikiLeaks released classified documents describing how the CIA monitored the 2012 French presidential election. The press release for the leak stated that it was published "as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series."
In March 2017, US intelligence and law enforcement officials said to the international wire agency Reuters that they had been aware of the CIA security breach which led to Vault 7 since late 2016. Two officials said they were focusing on "contractors" as the possible source of the leaks.
In 2017, federal law enforcement identified CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte as a suspected source of Vault 7.
The public source identifies “Vault 7” as series of documents released by WikiLeaks in 2017. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vault, series and documents.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Vault 7”, the useful work is to connect “series of documents released by WikiLeaks in 2017” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28912981. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2013, 2016 and 2022.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vault 7” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.