Wikileaks Document Claims CIA Intercepts Orders For Apple Products To Plant Spying Programs On Them

Newsweek reports:

The CIA allegedly developed tools to infect Apple Macs and iPhones in order to spy on them, according to documents released by WikiLeaks on Thursday. The Dark Matter leaks are the second tranche of the whistleblowing organization’s Vault 7 cache of classified documents, which WikiLeaks claims to have obtained from a former CIA contract worker.

Projects undertaken by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB) allegedly included the development of software that could be injected into the devices’ chips. A manual for a bug called “NightSkies 1.2” purportedly reveals that the intelligence agency has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since 2008.

WikiLeaks said in a statement: “While CIA assets are sometimes used to physically infect systems in the custody of a target it is likely that many CIA physical access attacks have infected the targeted organization’s supply chain including by interdicting mail orders and other shipments (opening, infecting, and resending) leaving the United States or otherwise.”

The CIA has declined to comment on the authenticity of the documents. More from Business Insider:



Apple says that the Mac and iOS vulnerabilities mentioned in a Wikileaks data dump on Thursday were fixed several years ago. The data dump, which includes CIA documents dating back to 2012, highlights how agents were able to infect Apple devices if they could gain physical access to them. Agents could allegedly gain access to a Mac’s firmware, for example, by using an Ethernet adapter that plugged into the computer’s Thunderbolt port. They could also compromise “factory fresh” iPhones, according to the documents.