A former CIA programmer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday for leaking the US spy agency's most valuable hacking tools to WikiLeaks:
Joshua Schulte, 35, was found guilty in 2022 of espionage and other charges in what the CIA called a "digital Pearl Harbor" -- the largest data breach in the history of the intelligence agency.
[...] US District Judge Jesse Furman sentenced Schulte to 40 years in prison for espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and child pornography.
Schulte worked for the CIA's elite hacking unit from 2012 to 2016 when he quietly took cyber tools used to break into computer and technology systems, according to court documents.
After quitting his job, he sent them to WikiLeaks, which began publishing the classified data in March 2017.
[...] The leaked data included a collection of malware, viruses, trojans, and "zero day" exploits that, once leaked out, were available for use by foreign intelligence groups, hackers and cyber extortionists around the world, they said.
Previously:
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 03 2024, @07:24PM (2 children)
>The leaked data included a collection of malware, viruses, trojans, and "zero day" exploits that, once leaked out, were available for use by foreign intelligence groups, hackers and cyber extortionists around the world, they said.
Sure, but was that really the "good stuff" or do they just want us to believe that this is the best they've got?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2024, @11:43PM (1 child)
There's a fine line between paranoia and schizophrenia.
They were not happy with this guy at all but there's always another vulnerability being inserted into critical infrastructure by code monkeys.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday February 04 2024, @12:30PM
You know what's nice when you have both paranoia and schizophrenia?
You outnumber your enemies 2-to-1.
🥁 🥁 🥁 Thank you! I'll be here all week.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday February 05 2024, @02:08PM
Instead of hoarding these "tools" howabout contacting the affected vendors so they can fix the problem. Then we all don't have to worry about chinese/russian/iranian hackers hacking us.
Of course, then the various TLAs can't then hack the chinese/russians/iranians, so it will never happen.
Bad decisions, great stories