WikiLeaks Releases User Guide for CIA's Tool for Remote Video Stream Collection

WikiLeaks whistleblowing website has shed a light on the "CouchPotato" project, a secret tool that the US Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) used to remotely hack into computers and steal images of users' video streams.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — WikiLeaks announced the release of a classified user guide for "CouchPotato" in a statement on Thursday.

"Today, August 10th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the User Guide for the CoachPotato project of the CIA. CouchPotato is a remote tool for collection against RTSP/H.264 video streams," the statement read.

RELEASE: CIA system for intercepting video chat and security camera streams. Uses CIA "Fire and Collect" framework. https://t.co/EDqsoZKgTo pic.twitter.com/t7nR8v8qMJ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 10 августа 2017 г.

The document explained that the CouchPotato tool allows for a video stream to be collected either as a video file in AVI file format or as series of still images of frames from the stream in JPG format.

"[CouchPotato] utilizes ffmpeg [software] for video and image encoding and decoding as well as RTSP [The Real Time Streaming Protocol] connectivity. CouchPotato relies on being launched in an ICE v3 Fire and Collect compatible loader," the statement overviewing the tool concluded.

The creation of the CouchPotato user guide dates back to February 14, 2014.

WikiLeaks released the first batch from the Vault 7 project in March, containing a total of 8,761 documents. Some of the latest releases were dedicated to a CIA project targeting SMS messages sent and receive on Android devices and to CIA tools for stealthy hacking of Apple's operating system.