Pierluigi Paganini August 10, 2017

WikiLeaks has published another Vault 7 leak, revealing the CIA tool CouchPotato that allows operators to remotely spy on video streams in real-time.

“Today, August 10th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the the User Guide for the CoachPotato project of the CIA. CouchPotato is a remote tool for collection against RTSP/H.264 video streams. It provides the ability to collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame. It utilizes ffmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding as well as RTSP connectivity. CouchPotato relies on being launched in an ICE v3 Fire and Collect compatible loader.” states Wikipedia.

The document leaked from the CIA details how the tool could be used by cyber spies to remotely capture RTSP/H.264 video streams.

The Real Time Streaming Protocol ( RTSP), is a network control protocol designed for controlling streaming media servers.

“CouchPotato is a remote tool for collection against RTSP/H.264 video streams. It provides the ability to collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame. CouchPotato utilizes ffmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding as well as RTSP connectivity.” reads the user guide. “In order to minimize size of the DLL binary, many of the audio and video codecs along with other unnecessary features have been removed from the version of ffmpeg that CouchPotato is built with. pHash, an image hashing algorithm, has been incorporated into ffmpeg’s image2 demuxer to provide image change detection capabilities. CouchPotato relies on being launched in an ICE v3 Fire and Collectcompatible loader.” 

The CouchPotato tool utilizes FFmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding and Real Time Streaming Protocol connectivity.

The CouchPotato tool is hard to detect, it supports the file-less ICE v3 “Fire and Collect” loader, which is an in-memory code execution (ICE) technique.

The documents don’t include details on how the CIA operators compromise the target systems. It is likely the CouchPotato tool needs to be used in conjunction with other hacking tools to penetrate the targeted systems.

Below the list of release published by Wikileaks since March:

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Wikileaks, CouchPotato tool)

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