If you are a regular reader of THN, you must be aware that this latest revelation by the whistleblower organisation is the part of an ongoing CIA-Vault 7 leaks, marking it as the 18th batch in the series.
If you are unaware of the Vault 7 leaks, you can head on to the second of this article for having a brief look on all the leaks at once.
Achilles — Tool to Backdoor Mac OS X Disk Images
Dubbed Achilles, the hacking tool allows CIA operators to combine malicious Trojan applications with a legitimate Mac OS app into a disk image installer (.DMG) file.
The binding tool, the shell script is written in Bash, gives the CIA operators “one or more desired operator specified executables” for a one-time execution.
Afterwards, all the traces of the Achilles tool would be “removed securely” from the downloaded application so that the file would “exactly resemble” the original legitimate app, un-trojaned application, making it hard for the investigators and antivirus software to detect the initial infection vector.
Achilles v1.0, developed in 2011, was only tested on Mac OS X 10.6, which is Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system that the company launched in 2009.
SeaPea — Stealthy Rootkit For Mac OS X Systems
The second hacking tool, called SeaPea, is a Mac OS X Rootkit that gives CIA operators stealth and tool launching capabilities by hiding important files, processes and socket connections from the users, allowing them to access Macs without victims knowledge.
Developed in 2011, the Mac OS X Rootkit works on computers running then-latest Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Operating System (32- or 64-bit Kernel Compatible) and Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) Operating System.
Aeris — An Automated Implant For Linux Systems
The third CIA hacking tool, dubbed Aeris, is an automated implant written in C programming language that is specifically designed to backdoor portable Linux-based Operating Systems, including Debian, CentOS, Red Hat — along with FreeBSD and Solaris.
Aeris is a builder that CIA operators can use to generate customised impacts, depending upon their covert operation.
“It supports automated file exfiltration, configurable beacon interval and jitter, stand-alone and Collide-based HTTPS LP support and SMTP protocol support — all with TLS encrypted communications with mutual authentication,”
“It’s compatible with the NOD Cryptographic Specification and provides structured command and control that’s similar to that used by several Windows implants.”
