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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.

Then there's "The.net," a VMware ESxi virtual machine host that acts as a virtual live Internet environment for software testing. Its domain names will be familiar to many gamers...

Abstergo abstergo.com Aperture Labs aperturelabs.com Black Mesa blackmesa.org Sarif Industries sarifindustries.com Umbrella Corp umbrellacorp.com

Rainmaker is a collection and network survey tool developed by CIA that is disguised as a music player on a USB. The documentation page for the project includes an animated GIF from a video for Fat Joe's "Make it Rain" (with President Barack Obama's head edited in).

One developer shared his dream list of new project names, based on "mostly oblique references to things I like, tvtropes names that amuse me and situations or phrases at work encoded in toolname-esque obscurity":

Mendicant Engineer – reserved for the next tool delivered during a gov't shutdown.

Starving Weasel – reference to the Weird Al song Albuquerque; "Hey, you've got weasels on your face"

Face Hugger – Aliens

Eldritch Abomination – tvtropes

Xanatos Gambit – tvtropes

Deadpan Snarker – tvtropes

Combat Pragmatist – tvtropes

Awesome McToolname – tvtropes

Chekhovs Gun – tvtropes

Humongous Mecha – tvtropes

Literal Genie – tvtropes

Monster Clown – tvtropes

Confused Undertaking

Discharge Tempest

Agonizing Neuralgia

Chronic Arthralgia

And of course there are the usual workplace shenanigans. The CIA's Engineering Development Group piloted the use of a number of commercial tools for managing development in 2013, and adopted Atlassian's Confluence for project documentation. That also meant giving every developer who used the system a home page. Some developers never added content to their personal pages, but one decided to hunt down those who left editing rights open on their "home page" and deface them with images—including animated GIFs from the anime series Trigun.