Today, Wikileaks dropped another series from their ‘Vault 7’ CIA hacks dubbed ‘Dark Matter’ where they reveal how Apple products are infected.
According to Wikileaks, ‘Dark Matter’ contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple MAC computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB).
The CIA has developed a huge range of attacks against iPhones since at least 2008 according to one of their ‘Dark Matter’ documents released. Wikileaks reports:
Among others, these documents reveal the “Sonic Screwdriver” project which, as explained by the CIA, is a “mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac laptop or desktop is booting” allowing an attacker to boot its attack software for example from a USB stick “even when a firmware password is enabled”. The CIA’s “Sonic Screwdriver” infector is stored on the modified firmware of an Apple Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter.
“DarkSeaSkies” is “an implant that persists in the EFI firmware of an Apple MacBook Air computer” and consists of “DarkMatter”, “SeaPea” and “NightSkies”, respectively EFI, kernel-space and user-space implants.
Documents on the “Triton” MacOSX malware, its infector “Dark Mallet” and its EFI-persistent version “DerStarke” are also included in this release. While the DerStarke1.4 manual released today dates to 2013, other Vault 7 documents show that as of 2016 the CIA continues to rely on and update these systems and is working on the production of DerStarke2.0.
Also included in this release is the manual for the CIA’s “NightSkies 1.2” a “beacon/loader/implant tool” for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.
While CIA assets are sometimes used to physically infect systems in the custody of a target it is likely that many CIA physical access attacks have infected the targeted organization’s supply chain including by interdicting mail orders and other shipments (opening, infecting, and resending) leaving the United States or otherwise.
Read the rest of the documents in the ‘Dark Matter’ series here.
WikiLeaks’ #Vault7 shows that the CIA has developed a huge range of attacks against iPhones since at least 2008.https://t.co/neRkgWFzcA pic.twitter.com/QFnh0WJ3kA
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 23, 2017
(Featured photo taken from Wikileaks twitter account)
