SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard. Twice.
Now, according to BBC, Wikileaks has released another incredible piece of [the CIA] arsenal. Wikileaks reportedly released the code that the CIA uses to disguise the origins of a computer virus as a part of Vault 7.
These hacking tools reportedly include decoy languages like Russian to disguise the national origins of the cyber attack or malware. The release may disrupt the CIA's current operations and reveal previous cyber operations.
Source: https://milo.yiannopoulos.net/2017/04/wikileaks-disrupt-cia/
Also at Ars Technica
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Wikileaks Releases Code That Could Unmask CIA Hacking Operations
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 99 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @06:08PM
Do you see the first link, "according to BBC [bbc.com]"? Strangely, you can click that and go right to the BBC's coverage, which I presume you consider neither Fake News, nor Alt-Right.
The main discrepancy seems to be BBC's "Included in the code library are fragments of Chinese and Farsi that are intended to be used in malware" vs. Milo's "decoy languages like Russian". Milo's article includes tweets (way down the page) revealing more languages (at least Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Farsi), while the BBC article contains a link to Rendition Infosec's analysis [renditioninfosec.com] which mentions the "presence of Russian, Farsi, Chinese, etc. strings in the source code", so they're not lying, they're just making it easier for you to get only the half of the story they want you to think about.
To be clear -- Milo wants you to read this and think, "Ah, the CIA 'hacked the election' and then tried to blame it on Russia!", so he hides all languages but Russian (unless you scroll way down to the tweets); the BBC doesn't want you to think that, so they hide Russian (unless you follow a link to their source). In reality, this toolkit gives us neither more nor less reason to suspect such false-flag shenanigans; surely we already knew/assumed the CIA employs some Russian linguists who could do such things, if for some reason they found it worth doing. But you should be wary of anyone who selectively conceals facts to try to manipulate their readers, and both Milo and the BBC are seen doing that right here.
A separate issue is that the fragments in random languages appear to be Lorem Ipsum texts, and thus are more likely meant for testing the obfuscation framework with different languages and different character sets, rather than for actual inclusion in malware. Again, you can see this for yourself by scrolling way down in Milo's article, to view the original tweets, or by following a link in the BBC article, but neither of them bother mentioning it in the article text.
As I said, CIA surely has Russian, Chinese, Farsi, and other linguists who could generate real strings to embed in false-flag malware, but this isn't the smoking gun wikileaks wants to portray it as; it's just an obfuscation tool designed to work well on arbitrary languages.