Scribbles, a.k.a. the "Snowden Stopper," is a slice of software allegedly designed to embed 'web beacon' tags into confidential documents, allowing the spying way to runway whistleblowers as well as unusual spies.
Since March, equally part of its "Vault 7" series, the Whistleblowing website has published thousands of documents as well as other confidential data that the whistleblower grouping claims came from the the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The CIA itself described Scribbles equally a "batch processing tool for pre-generating watermarks as well as inserting those watermarks into documents that are obviously beingness stolen past times FIO (foreign word officers) actors."
Here's How Scribbles Tool Works:
Scribbles is coded inwards C# programming linguistic communication as well as generates a random watermark for each document, inserts it into the document, saves all processed documents inwards an output directory, as well as creates a log file that identifies the watermarks inserted into every document.
This technique industrial plant just inwards the same way equally the "tracking pixel" works, where a tiny pixel-sized ikon is embedded within an email, allowing marketers as well as companies to expire along runway of how many users bring seen the advertisement.
So, every fourth dimension the watermarked document is accessed past times anyone, including potential whistleblowers, it volition secretly charge an embedded file inwards the background, which creates an entry on the CIA's server, containing unique data nearly the ane who accessed it, including the fourth dimension postage as well as his/her IP address.
"It generates a random watermark for each document, inserts that watermark into the document, saves all such processed documents inwards an output directory, as well as creates a log file which identifies the watermarks inserted into each document," Scribbles' user guide manual reads.
Scribbles Only Works amongst Microsoft Office Products
The user manual also specifies that the tool is intended for off-line preprocessing of Microsoft Office documents. So, if the watermarked documents are opened inwards whatever other application similar OpenOffice or LibreOffice, they may divulge watermarks as well as URLs to the user.
According to the documentation, "the Scribbles document watermarking tool has been successfully tested on…Microsoft Office 2013 (on Windows 8.1 x64), documents from Office versions 97–2016 (Office 95 documents volition non work!) [and]...documents that are non live on locked forms, encrypted, or password-protected."However, since the hidden watermarks are loaded from a remote server, this technique should operate solely when the user accessing the marked documents is connected to the Internet.
WikiLeaks notes that the latest released version of Scribbles (v1.0 RC1) dated March 1, 2016, which indicates it was inwards role upwards until at to the lowest degree terminal yr as well as seemingly meant to stay classified until 2066.
More technical details of Scribble tin live on constitute inwards the User Guide.
So far, Wikileaks has revealed the "Year Zero" batch which uncovered CIA hacking exploits for pop hardware as well as software, the "Dark Matter" batch which focused on hacking exploits the way designed to target iPhones as well as Macs, the "Marble" batch, as well as the "Grasshopper" batch that divulge a framework, allowing the way to easily exercise custom malware for breaking into Microsoft's Windows as well as bypassing antivirus protection.
