Alwaght- US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, has the ability to infiltrate and control iPhones, WikiLeaks has revealed.
According to whistleblower website’s latest Vault 7 release named ‘Dark Matter’, CIA’s alleged ability to infiltrate and control iPhones through a tool called NightSkies, which is physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones and allows the CIA to monitor and download files from targets’ phones undetected.
NightSkies works in the background and grants “full remote command and control,” to the CIA, allowing it to upload and download files from iPhones, including details from the owner’s phonebook, text messages and call logs, and to execute actions on the phones as it wishes.
In the press release regarding the latest ‘Vault 7’ leak, WikiLeaks says that NightSkies “is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones.”
According to the documents, hackers working for the US government could breach iPhones and install malicious software on the devices’ “firmware”, which is its permanent software. If true, it means a targeted iPhone owner would never be able to remove the hacking software. Even a “factory reset”, in which all data is deleted and the operating system is reinstalled, could not remove the firmware hack. The documents discussing NightSkies date to 2008, soon after the first iPhone was released.
Nightskies is made up of three components: an implant, a Listening Post (LP) and a post-processing program.
The implant runs undetected on the phone once it has been physically installed.
The CIA monitors the phone for activity, including its browser history file, YouTube video cache or mail metadata. Once it is used for the first time, NightSkies kicks in and sends information to a preconfigured LP.
LPs are used to monitor devices, such as computers and phones, which have been hacked with the CIA’s malware implants. They can be physical or virtual and stored on a CIA computer server.
The revelation that the CIA is physically infiltrating factory fresh phones suggests it has accessed the organization's supply chain, meaning they may be accessing phones as they are shipped to targets, with CIA agents or assets physically tampering with suspects’ phones before they even receive them.
