The spyware goes along with CIA’s liaison services, possibly offered to US security agencies like NSA, FBI, and Homeland Security among others. Through the liaison services, maintained by CIA’s OTS (Office of Technical Services) branch, the agency expects to harvest biometric data from the partners.
“But this ‘voluntary sharing’ obviously does not work or is considered insufficient by the CIA, because ExpressLane is a covert information collection tool that is used by the CIA to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services,” writes WikiLeaks.
ExpressLane disguises itself as a software update for the biometric software. It is manually installed by CIA technicians (via secret partition on a USB drive) on to partner systems along with the biometrics collection system. Meanwhile, the partners being completely unaware of what other things are present on their system.
The spying tool transfers the information, that might not have been shared by the partners, to flash drive for the further examination by the technicians. They also have a kill-switch at hand, requiring the system to be physically restored after a specified amount of time, if the partner refuses the update.
ExpressLane adds to the set of CIA-related tools and services released by Wikileaks in the past. Check out more details about ExpressLane using this link.
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