WikiLeaks Releases CIA Documents on Grasshopper Framework for Building Customized Malware Payloads

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WikiLeaks Releases CIA Documents on Grasshopper Framework for Building Customized Malware Payloads

By CircleID Reporter
April 07, 2017, 4:07 pm PDT Views: 5,978 Add Comment

WikiLeaks on Friday released a new set of leaks—Vault 7 “Grasshopper”—containing 27 documents from the CIA’s Grasshopper framework, a platform used to build customized malware payloads for Microsoft Windows operating systems. WikiLeaks, April 7: “Grasshopper is provided with a variety of modules that can be used by a CIA operator as blocks to construct a customized implant that will behave differently, for example maintaining persistence on the computer differently, depending on what particular features or capabilities are selected in the process of building the bundle. Additionally, Grasshopper provides a very flexible language to define rules that are used to ‘perform a pre-installation survey of the target device, assuring that the payload will only [be] installed if the target has the right configuration’. Through this grammar CIA operators are able to build from very simple to very complex logic used to determine, for example, if the target device is running a specific version of Microsoft Windows, or if a particular Antivirus product is running or not.”

By CircleID Reporter

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