There are lots of technical details on the Central Intelligence Agency's software development process for espionage tools in the documents dumped by WikiLeaks earlier this week—many of which we'll take a closer look at over the coming days and weeks as even more documents are published. But there's one thing that's immediately clear from perusing the personal pages of CIA Engineering Development Group software developers that were included in the dump: they are like the rest of us in tech. The liberal use of Internet memes, animated GIF images, as well as gamer- and pop-culture references sprinkled throughout the serious business of building software to support CIA's espionage mission makes this leak look like a peek inside any random development team's internal Wiki.
| Abstergo | abstergo.com |
| Aperture Labs | aperturelabs.com |
| Black Mesa | blackmesa.org |
| Sarif Industries | sarifindustries.com |
| Umbrella Corp | umbrellacorp.com |
CIA developers used movie and game references for a number of project names, including "Ricky Bobby"—a backdoor for intelligence collection designed to be dropped from a USB stick inserted by a CIA "asset" named for Will Ferrell's role in Talladega Nights. Ricky Bobby sent its data to a listener called "Cal"—named for John C. Reilly's character in that film, Ricky Bobby's teammate and friend. An "implant" for Apple iOS devices (effective on iOS versions 7 through 8.2) is named "DRBOOM," after a character from the card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. At right, you can see one developer's "dream list" for new project names.
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