The claims, checked
David Wolfe posted a clip on Nov. 12, 2026. His caption and the words in the clip are two claims.
- Wolfe's caption says the "CIA has been working on TOP SECRET CYBER ATTACK called KILLWARE" to take down banks, the internet, the power grid and water: Not supported by the clip, and not found in any public page Profoundd read. The speaker is Whitney Webb. She does not mention the CIA. She offers a bank scenario, then a 2021 warning, then a private company's drill. A real top-secret plan would not appear in an open news story. This check cannot see classified files. The pages it could read do not describe a CIA program by that name.
- Webb says Mayorkas has said the next threat is an event "that he called killware": Overstated. USA Today's 2021 article, read here in Yahoo's reprint, uses the word in the headline and the opening. His quoted sentences do not. He said an attempted hack of a Florida water plant "demonstrated the grave risks that malicious cyber activity poses to public health and safety." The article says he and other experts said attacks on hospitals, water, banks, police and transport could injure or kill. Gartner's Wam Voster wrote that malware has "entered the realm of 'killware.'" That is a label for a kind of attack. The article does not show him using the word.
- Webb says Cybereason ran a 2020 drill with DHS "to get the U.S. presidential election canceled and martial law declared": Partly right. The exercise took place on November 5, 2019, in Washington. Cybereason said it was practice for the case where a nation-state attacked election-day infrastructure. The red team was Cybereason's own hackers. The blue team included the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and Arlington, Virginia police. The simulated deaths and injuries — more than 30 dead and 200 hurt — were part of the scenario, not real events. Quartz reporter Justin Rohrlich reviewed a debriefing document that Cybereason shared with Quartz. Rohrlich writes, in Quartz: "Amid all this, the election was canceled and people were told to go home. The government declared a state of emergency and martial law." What is not supported is the purpose Webb named. The exercise was not run in order to cancel the election and declare martial law. The red team's stated job was to undermine the election. Quartz reports that forcing the blue team to cancel the election, "under the simulation's rules, was not the same thing" as a red-team win. Quartz quotes the Cybereason report as saying "the Blue Team being forced to reschedule the election prevented the Red Team from winning."
What Webb does say
Webb calls a cyber attack on the banks "a very possible scenario." She says it could let banks off a financial crisis, leave only the biggest banks, and move people onto a digital currency if their money had disappeared. She cites no document. Profoundd did not find one. That scenario is hers.
She says killware means attacks on water and the power grid that can kill people, not a weapon that kills by its name. The article's example was a February 2021 incident at the water plant in Oldsmar, Florida.
In April 2023 the FBI told the Tampa Bay Times it could not confirm a targeted cyber intrusion at Oldsmar. WUSF reported that email. The city manager called it a "nonevent" that may have been a staff mistake, and the sheriff said the case was still open. The 2021 article had used Oldsmar as an attempted hack. The same article described a woman in Germany who died after a hacker attack forced her hospital to send her to another city. It said no proven link was established.
Profoundd's read
The caption states a CIA program. The clip states a commentator's scenario, a warning about attacks by other people, and a private company's 2019 game. In the article that spread the word, killware names a kind of attack that can kill. No public page Profoundd read uses it as the name of a CIA attack. The Oldsmar case that article used was still open in 2023, and the FBI had not confirmed a targeted intrusion.
Reporting through Thursday, November 12, 2026. Sources: David Wolfe on X, Nov. 12, 2026; the clip, also at YouTube; USA Today, via Yahoo, October 2021; SiliconANGLE, Oct. 13, 2021; Cybereason, Nov. 7, 2019; WUSF, April 13, 2023; Quartz, November 2019.
Correction, November 12, 2026. The first published version of this item rated Webb's claim "Not supported by the company's release." That rating was based only on Cybereason's own public write-up from November 7, 2019, which describes the election as rescheduled and does not mention martial law or a state of emergency. Quartz's account of a debriefing document that Cybereason shared with that outlet — which Profoundd has not read — includes both details inside the simulation. Because Quartz's account supports the canceled-election and martial-law details Webb described, the rating has been changed to "Partly right."
