Ex-CIA Employee Convicted of Leaking 'Vault 7' Secrets to Wikileaks
upstart writes:
Ex-CIA Employee Convicted of Leaking 'Vault 7' Secrets to Wikileaks:
The leak, among the largest ever to affect the CIA, showed the agency could hack smart TVs, Skype accounts, and lots of common web applications.
A former Central Intelligence Agency computer engineer has been convicted of leaking a large tranche of classified material that revealed some of the agency's most powerful hacking techniques. Joshua Schulte, 33, worked for an elite software team within the CIA when he stole a cache of documents in 2016 and shared them with Wikileaks, which published the material in 2017. It was one of the worst breaches in the CIA's history.
Schulte was found guilty of nine charges, including illegally gathering and distributing national defense information, by a federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday. The convictions could net him up to 80 years in prison.
[...] "Vault 7" consisted of some 9,000 pages and shed light on a host of creepy hacking techniques used by the agency. The leak demonstrated that the CIA had developed the capability to hack into smart TVs and turn them into a surveillance devices (very 1984), that it had enlisted a previously unknown army of hackers, and that those keyboard warriors work around the clock to penetrate all sorts of smart phones, operating systems, popular communication services like Skype, and even common anti-virus software. According to Wikileaks, the CIA also "hoarded" zero-day vulnerabilities-unknown bugs that could be exploited to gain access to technical systems with extreme speed. The government says that these tactics are used to break into the networks of terrorists and foreign adversaries.
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