Last updated at Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:54:31 GMT
What follows are some first impressions on the contents of the WikiLeaks Vault7 dump. I won't be addressing the legal or ethical concerns about posting classified data that can endanger the missions and goals of American intelligence organizations. I also won't be talking about whether or not the CIA should be involved in developing cyber capabilities in the first place as we have previously written about our views on this topic. But, I will talk about the technical content of the documents posted today, which all appear to come from a shared, cross-team internal Confluence wiki used by several CIA branches, groups, and teams.
After spending the last few hours poring over the newly released material from WikiLeaks, Vault7, I'm left with the impression that the activities at the CIA with regards to developing cyber capabilities are... pretty normal.
The material is primarily focused on the capabilities of "implants" -- applications that are installed on systems after they've been compromised -- and how they're used to exfiltrate data and maintain persistence after an initial compromise of a variety of devices from Samsung smart TVs to Apple iPhones to SOHO routers, and everything in between.
The material also covers the command and control infrastructure that the CIA maintains to remotely use these implants; primarily, the details are concerned with building and testing the various components that makes up this network.
Finally, there are the projects that are focused on exploits. The exploits described are either developed in-house, or acquired from external partners. Most of the internally developed exploits are designed to escalate privileges once access is secured, while most of the remote capabilities were acquired from other intelligence organizations and contractors. The CIA does appear to prefer to develop and use exploits that have a local, physical access component.
While there is still a lot left to look at in detail, the overwhelming impression that I get from reading the material is that working on offensive tech at the CIA is pretty similar to working on any software project at any tech company. More to the point, the CIA activities detailed here are eerily similar to working on Metasploit at Rapid7. Take, for example, this post about the Meterpreter Mettle project from 2015 (which was written about the same time as these documents). Tell me that Mettle doesn't read like any one of the technical overviews in Vault7.
As we spend more time digging through the Vault7 material, and if more material is released over time, I expect we'll be less and less surprised. So far, these documents show that the CIA branches and subgroups named in the documents are behaving pretty much exactly as one might expect of any software development shop. Yes, they happen to be developing exploit code. But, as we all know, that particular capability, in and of itself, isn't novel, illegal, or evil. Rapid7, along with many other security research organizations, both public and private, do it every day for normal and legitimate security purposes.
Until I see something that's strikingly unusual, I'm having a hard time staying worked up over Vault7.
