Security News
A former CIA software engineer accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's hacking tools and handing it over to WikiLeaks was convicted of only minor charges Monday, after a jury deadlocked on the more serious espionage charges against him. Joshua Schulte, who worked as a coder at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was convicted by a jury of contempt of court and making false statements after a four-week trial in Manhattan federal court that offered an unusual window into the CIA's digital sleuthing and the team that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries.
The extraordinary trial of a former CIA sysadmin accusing of leaking top-secret hacking tools to WikiLeaks has ended in a mistrial. Some of those motions will ask for information from the prosecution that was kept from her during the trial, most controversially the case of "Michael," a co-worker of Schulte who was put on administrative leave by the CIA when evidence emerged linking him to the theft of the Vault 7 hacking tools.
A federal judge in New York on Monday declared a mistrial in the case of a former CIA software engineer who was accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's classified hacking and tools and leaking it to WikiLeaks whistleblower website. Schulte, who designed hacking tools and malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was arrested in August 2017 and initially charged with possession and transportation of child pornography.
A federal judge in New York on Monday declared a mistrial in the case of a former CIA software engineer who was accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's classified hacking and tools and leaking it to WikiLeaks whistleblower website. Schulte, who designed hacking tools and malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was arrested in August 2017 and initially charged with possession and transportation of child pornography.
The fate of the man accused of leaking top-secret CIA hacking tools - software that gave the American spy agency access to targets' phones and computer across the world - is now in the hands of a jury. Joshua Schulte stands accused of stealing the highly valuable materials directly from the CIA's innermost sanctum and slipping them to WikiLeaks to share with the rest of the planet.
The Chinese company claims it's aware of attacks launched by the CIA between September 2008 and June 2019. "In the CIA's attack against Chinese aviation organizations and scientific research institutions, we found that attackers mainly targeted system developers in these sectors to carry out the campaigns," Qihoo said in an English-language blog post.
A software engineer on trial in the largest leak of classified information in CIA history was "Prepared to do anything" to betray the agency, federal prosecutors said Monday as a defense attorney argued the man had been scapegoated for a breach that exposed secret cyberweapons and spying techniques. A Manhattan jury heard conflicting portrayals of Joshua Schulte, a former CIA coder accused of sending the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks a large portion of the agency's computer hacking arsenal - tools the agency had used to conduct espionage operations overseas.
Qihoo 360, one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms, today published a new report accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to be behind an 11-year-long hacking campaign against several Chinese industries and government agencies. The claims made by the company are based on the evidential connection between tools, tactics, and procedures used by a hacking group, dubbed 'APT-C-39' against Chinese industries, and the 'Vault 7' hacking tools developed by the CIA. As you may remember, the massive collection of Vault 7 hacking tools was leaked to the public in 2017 by the whistleblower website Wikileaks, which it received from Joshua Adam Schulte, a former CIA employee who is currently facing charges for leaking classified information.
Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the German BND intelligence service secretly controlled the majority of the Swiss firm Crypto AG, giving the two agencies access to the company's communication equipment, which was used around the world for top-secret government messages, according to the reports. A former Crypto AG worker told Switzerland's SRF television station that he would find two sets of encryption algorithms within the company's devices.
Swiss authorities said Tuesday they have opened an investigation into allegations a Zug, Switzerland-based maker of encryption devices was a front operated by the CIA and West German intelligence that enabled them to break the codes of the countries that used their products. A joint investigation published Tuesday by Germany's ZDF public broadcaster and The Washington Post based on documents from the CIA and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency revealed that Crypto AG made millions of dollars for the two agencies, while providing them with access to the encrypted communications of more than 120 countries for decades.