Elizabeth Weise

USATODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple said late Thursday it had patched years ago any of the alleged CIA hacks to its iPhone and Mac released by WikiLeaks earlier in the day and that it has "not negotiated with Wikileaks for any information."

"We have preliminarily assessed the Wikileaks disclosures from this morning. Based on our initial analysis, the alleged iPhone vulnerability affected iPhone 3G only and was fixed in 2009 when iPhone 3GS was released," the company said in a statement to USA TODAY. "Additionally, our preliminary assessment shows the alleged Mac vulnerabilities were previously fixed in all Macs launched after 2013."

Leaks website WikiLeaks early Thursday released new documents it claims are from the Central Intelligence Agency which show the CIA had the capability to bug iPhones even if their operating systems have been deleted and replaced. The documents were posted on the WikiLeaks site.

A "factory reset" involves deleting a phone's operating system and any tainted or problematic programs that might have been loaded onto it and replacing it with a fresh version that contains no external computer code.

WikiLeaks claims the CIA had a program that could stay resident on an iPhone despite having the entire operating system scrubbed. The code, WikiLeaks said, is located in the firmware which stays on the phone's chips.

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The documents WikiLeaks claims are from the CIA are related to surveillance systems that date as far back as 2008. It is unclear whether the systems described are still functional. If true, they would indicate that the CIA was looking into ways to bug iPhones soon after they were first introduced in 2007. WikiLeaks, in a posting on its website, said that capability was developed by the CIA's Embedded Development Branch.

The latest documents also detail an alleged "Sonic Screwdriver" project that would allow a hacker to boot attack software onto a Mac laptop or desktop from a peripheral device, such as a USB stick.

This is the second posting of what WikiLeaks claims is a cache of documents it obtained from the CIA. The first was released March 7.

Federal authorities have launched a criminal investigation into the public release of the document caches to determine whether the disclosure represented a breach from the outside or a leak from inside the spy agency.

Two days after WikiLeaks published thousands of documents it said revealed hacking tools the CIA developed to break into servers, smartphones, computers and TVs, founder Julian Assange — speaking from the Embassy of Ecuador in London — said it will allow tech companies access to much more detailed information about CIA hacking techniques so they can "develop fixes" before the information is widely published.

Apple, in its Thursday statement, deflected any speculation that it had taken up the organization on its offer.

"We have not negotiated with Wikileaks for any information," the statement read. Instead, the Cupertino, Calif., consumer device company gave it instructions to submit any instructions through its normal process. Apple said it hasn't received any information from Wikileaks that wasn't in the public domain.

"We are tireless defenders of our users' security and privacy, but we do not condone theft or coordinate with those that threaten to harm our users."

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In a statement on March 8, the CIA said that it had "no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents."

However, the agency noted that it is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance within the United States "and CIA does not do so."