WikiLeaks Publishes CIA ‘Dumbo’ Project That Turns Off Security Cams, Corrupts Recordings

WikiLeaks has published documents from the CIA “Dumbo” project, which allegedly allows the U.S. government to turn off security webcams and corrupt recordings to hide “physical intrusions.”

The leaked documents are the latest entry in the WikiLeaks Vault 7 dump, which has seen other reported CIA cyber-weapons leaked in detail to the public, including the Mac-hacking tool “Imperial,” secure shell exploit “Bothanspy,” geolocation-tracking project “Elsa,” Wi-Fi breaching tool “Cherry Blossom,” and malware “Pandemic.”

“Today, August 3rd 2017 WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Dumbo project of the CIA,” announced WikiLeaks on Thursday. “Dumbo is a capability to suspend processes utilizing webcams and corrupt any video recordings that could compromise a PAG deployment. The PAG (Physical Access Group) is a special branch within the CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence); its task is to gain and exploit physical access to target computers in CIA field operations.”

“Dumbo can identify, control and manipulate monitoring and detection systems on a target computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system. It identifies installed devices like webcams and microphones, either locally or connected by wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi) or wired networks,” WikiLeaks claimed. “All processes related to the detected devices (usually recording, monitoring or detection of video/audio/network streams) are also identified and can be stopped by the operator. By deleting or manipulating recordings the operator is aided in creating fake or destroying actual evidence of the intrusion operation.”

WikiLeaks continued to claim that Dumbo can be “run by the field agent directly from an USB stick.”

Various documents were included in the leak, including user guides, field guides, and user briefings across three versions, which are dated from March 2012 to July 2015.