Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cyberwarfare

Ex-CIA Employee Suspected in WikiLeaks ‘Vault7’ Leak

A former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is believed to have provided WikiLeaks the files made public by the whistleblower organization as part of its ‘Vault 7’ leak, which focuses on hacking tools used by the CIA.

A former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is believed to have provided WikiLeaks the files made public by the whistleblower organization as part of its ‘Vault 7’ leak, which focuses on hacking tools used by the CIA.

According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, the suspect is 29-year-old software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte. The man’s LinkedIn profile shows that he worked for the NSA for five months in 2010 as a systems engineer, and then joined the CIA as a software engineer. He left the CIA in November 2016, when he moved to New York City and started working as a senior software engineer for Bloomberg.

While authorities reportedly started suspecting Schulte of providing files to WikiLeaks roughly one week after the first round of Vault 7 documents were released in March 2017, he still has not been charged in connection to the leaks. Instead, he has been jailed for possessing child pornography.

Investigators discovered the illegal materials after conducting a search of his apartment and devices based on a warrant that named Schulte a suspect in the distribution of national defense information.

The materials had been hosted on a file sharing server set up by the suspect. However, he has pleaded not guilty to the charges, claiming that up to 100 people had access to that server. Prosecutors, on the other hand, cited conversations between Schulte and others allegedly showing that he had been aware of the presence of child pornography on the system.

Schulte was charged on three counts of receipt, possession and transportation of child pornography in August 2017. He was arrested and set free in September, but he was prohibited from leaving New York City and accessing computers. He has been in jail since December, when authorities claimed he had violated these rules.

The investigation continues and prosecutors expect to file a new indictment related to the Vault 7 leaks sometime in the next 45 days.

While at the CIA, Schulte reportedly helped develop the tools used by the agency in its cyber operations. Researchers have linked the Vault 7 tools to a cyber espionage group tracked as Longhorn and The Lamberts.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

When it started publishing the Vault 7 files, WikiLeaks said the documents had been circulating among former U.S. government hackers and contractors.

The Washington Post obtained a statement from Schulte in which he claimed that the FBI “made the snap judgement” that he was guilty of the leaks due to the fact that he had left the CIA on poor terms just months before the Vault 7 leak started.

Related: NSA Contractor Charged With Leaking Russia Hacking Report

Related: NSA Contractor Pleads Guilty in Embarrassing Leak Case

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON - Cyberattacks are the most serious threat facing the United States, even more so than terrorism, according to American defense experts. Almost half...

Cyberwarfare

Russian espionage group Nomadic Octopus infiltrated a Tajikistani telecoms provider to spy on 18 entities, including government officials and public service infrastructures.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Malware & Threats

The NSA and FBI warn that a Chinese state-sponsored APT called BlackTech is hacking into network edge devices and using firmware implants to silently...

Cyberwarfare

Several hacker groups have joined in on the Israel-Hamas war that started over the weekend after the militant group launched a major attack.

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...