A report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has raised serious doubts about the US intelligence agency’s handling of safety measures, after finding that the CIA used "flawed" websites for covert communications for years. 

Using only a single website, as well as publicly available material such as historical internet scanning results and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Citizen Lab said it identified a network of 885 websites that it attributed “with high confidence” as having been used by the CIA between 2004 and 2013.

Although the researchers said the websites were probably not used by the CIA recently, they revealed that a subset of them are still linked to active intelligence employees or assets, including a foreign contractor and a current state department employee. 

The researchers reported that the websites included similar Java, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and CGI artifacts that implemented or apparently loaded...