The agent seemed to be experienced, having worked at the facility since 2009, according to a log of his or her activities in the WikiLeaks documents.
A Chinese-speaking CIA agent eventually translated the dialogue box for his frustrated English-speaking colleague.
Tang Wei, a cybersecurity engineer and the marketing director of Beijing-based security company Rising, said these seemingly trivial antidotes in the WikiLeaks files might contain some valuable information.
“The American cyberwar machine has been operating under the hood and it is very difficult for an outsider to get a glimpse of what happens inside an operation centre. These documents revealed the tip of an iceberg,” he said.
The knowledge of how the CIA cyber units operate and the weaknesses and strengths of their agents will help other parties to come up with more effective defences or counter-attacks, according to Tang.
The language barrier, for instance, came as a surprise. The issue rarely entered the heads of cybersecurity experts because nearly all code lines are written in universal languages any programmer in the world can read.
