Joshua Schulte, a former U.S. government programmer, The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been held responsible for disclosing to WikiLeaks a cache of secret government hacking tools and exploits known as Vault 7.
When WikiLeaks made the contents of Vault 7 available to the public, foreign intelligence agencies, hackers, and cyber extortionists from all over the world gained access to this collection of malware, trojans, and zero-day exploits.
In March 2017, WikiLeaks started sharing the data that had been stolen. A total of 8,761 papers were leaked, revealing how CIA agents conducted overseas espionage operations by hacking Apple and Android cellphones and using internet-connected TVs as listening devices.
The CIA’s hacking of Apple and Android smartphones for overseas espionage operations and attempts to transform internet-connected televisions into listening devices were both made public in the so-called Vault 7 release.
At the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, Schulte had worked as a coder and contributed to the development of the hacking tools before his arrest.
The 33-year-old Schulte, according to the prosecution, was driven to plan the leak because he thought the CIA had humiliated him by denying his complaints about the workplace. He allegedly attempted to “burn to the ground” the very piece of work that he had collaborated on with the agency.
The CIA was also obliged to immediately halt some of its intelligence operations as a result of the disclosure, with its own investigators estimating that up to 34 terabytes of material may have been stolen in the leak.
Schulte was found guilty of “one of the most audacious and devastating acts of espionage in American history,” according to U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.
Williams claimed that Schulte exposed some of the country’s “most valuable intelligence-gathering cyber capabilities used to combat terrorist organizations and other pernicious influences around the globe” to the public and to U.S. foes.
He continued his crimes while incarcerated and awaiting trial, authorities said, by attempting to leak more top-secret information from jail while waging a “information war” against the government.
