What could be the largest leak of C.I.A. documents ever occured on Tuesday, March 7. Pages and pages describing advanced software, tools, and techniques used by the C.I.A to hack into smartphones, computers, and even Internet-connected televisions were made public. The agency seemed to be surprised by the information leak on Tuesday morning and C.I.A. spokesman Dean Boyd said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.” WikiLeaks said this was only the first part of a larger collection of secret C.I.A. material that includes 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments many of them partly edited by WikiLeaks editors to avoid revealing the actual code for cyber weapons.

The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code. Included in the documents released is a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools, also included are instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer tools to use them for spying. Skype, Wi-Fi networks, documents in PDF format and even antivirus programs could be hacked by the cyber weapons. There are multiple programs for doing different things to susceptible devices; for example, a program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted computer. Another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer. Other program codenames are CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget.