The paper is specific to delivery of malware to airgapped networks. The NSA's RAGEMASTER which you are thinking of, and the whole VAGRANT family, is only a surv

The paper is specific to delivery of malware to airgapped networks. The NSA's RAGEMASTER which you are thinking of, and the whole VAGRANT family, is only a surveillance system - it does not allow for the insertion of any type of software. There is also a useful differentiation in that NSA TAO-type techniques generally require that physical access be established (either to the environment or to equipment being taken into the environment), so in some sense they do not "jump" the air-gap... it's assumed that the method of insertion has already solved that problem. This paper discusses tools that are intended to make their way from a public network into an air-gapped one. In other words, there is a difference between tools for merely exfiltrating from an airgapped environment (having gained access some other way) and tools to actually gain access to the environment by software means. Physically infiltrating, tampering, etc to get an implant into an airgapped environment is old hat in the intelligence world, and so there are many defenses against it, but a "malware" approach to getting a software implant in is a pretty new thing with fewer defenses. Although as this paper shows, epoxy in the USB ports has proven surprisingly effective.