Espionage
CIA Modified VLC Media Player to Spy on Users Via WikiLeaks Revelation
Lex Fridman Podcast
#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet
"The CIA had like a custom version of VLC where they had a specific plugin. It was the normal binaries of VLC, except they added one DLL. I think it was psapi.dll, which was basically reading your document folder, encrypting that, and sending that."
Kempf confirmed that WikiLeaks' Vault 7 documents exposed the CIA creating a modified version of VLC with a surveillance plugin. The agency used targeted advertisements to trick users into downloading the malicious version. While watching movies, the plugin would silently encrypt and exfiltrate documents from users' computers without detection.
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Lex Fridman Podcast