Ma Ruofei
In early March, WikiLeaks announced a group of U.S. government confidential documents called "Vault 7". The documents revealed a secret: The US Government Intelligence Agency’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a long-range digital intrusion plan targeting dispersed targets such as civilians.
This week, WikiLeaks further released the latest documents for "No. 7 Vault". These documents show that the CIA's digital intrusion plans not only use traditional hacking methods to invade smart phones, computers and Internet smart TVs, they also have more. Covert, more imaginative means.
A tool document called "Sonic Screwdriver v1.0" shows that if the CIA is interested in an encrypted Apple Mac computer, even if the computer's owner is security conscious, the intrusion may come from completely unexpected. The direction: network cable adapter.
After 2012, the Apple Macbook Pro computer is no longer equipped with a native RJ-45 Ethernet cable interface, users can buy a "thunderbolt" interface to the cable interface accessories using a wired network. In 2012, CIA developed the "ultrasonic screwdriver 1.0" loophole, which directly writes malicious software into the firmware chip of the network cable accessories. If the user plugs infected parts into the computer, the Mac computer will be malicious according to the system startup process. The software is loaded directly into the computer.
The frightening part of this vulnerability is that because the Mac computer reads the firmware of the external accessories through the EFI firmware system at startup, the "Ultrasonic screwdriver 1.0" can be used to directly install undetectable malware with very high authority.
The WikiLeaks disclosure document further shows that there are several types of malware in the CIA that can be used in conjunction with "ultrasonic screwdrivers" to steal data.
The malicious software named Der Starke v1.4 can infect the Mac computer with an "ultrasonic screwdriver" or U disk. It will directly infect the firmware of the computer, which means that ordinary users "do not run unsolicited software". The defense method will completely fail because Der Starke v1.4 will run completely silently, allowing CIA to remotely access your entire hard drive. At the same time, Der Starke v1.4 will disguise the network upload process of stealing files as a browser process. When users view the network process, they can only see one Facebook page uploading a picture.
In earlier 2008, CIA designed a loophole called NightSkies v1.2 to covertly penetrate the iPhone. In the era of iPhone OS 2.1 and iPhone 3G, iTunes software did not request data from the Apple server to verify the integrity of the firmware when reinstalling the phone. So once the user downloads and installs the iPhone firmware modified by the CIA from an unofficial channel, the phone is completely transparent to the CIA.
Fortunately, the WikiLeaks disclosed this tool has theoretically failed, Apple released a statement after the disclosure of the document, saying that all the iPhone and Mac vulnerabilities have been repaired in 2013.
But for the average user, there are several simple ways to avoid similar threats: Do not buy second-hand computer accessories, especially card readers, network cable adapters, docking stations and other accessories that contain chips, and remember that Mac computers The fact that anti-virus software is not popular does not mean that Mac is absolutely secure.
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