A Manhattan court jury found Joshua Schulte guilty of all nine charges pending against him, a cumulative 80 years in prison. The former computer security specialist for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is accused of having revealed to WikiLeaks documents and source code of spying tools used by the agency.
Justice Department Attorney Damian Williams called Schulte's conduct "one of the most harmful acts of espionage in U.S. history," with the leak that included "some of the most critical spying tools" to be revealed to the public and to opposing nations.
The case dates back to 2017, when WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of documents and source code for CIA tools. The information was then published in a dataset that would come to be known as 'Vault7'. The leak contained specifications of zero-day vulnerabilities exploited by the CIA to spy on their targets. Initially, WikiLeaks pledged not to publicize these flaws before speaking with the software's creators.
The vulnerabilities concerned iOS, Android, Windows operating systems and even Samsung's smart TVs. However, the organization will have taken a while to contact the manufacturers and ended up moving forward with the disclosure anyway.
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Sean Roche, the CIA's Director of Digital Innovation, likened the information leak to a "digital Pearl Harbour", explaining that the agency even had to shut down most ongoing operations while assessing the impact of the revelations.
The publication Vice cites Sean Roche, who considers that the former hacker “immediately endangered the relationships we had with other parts of government and with vital partners in foreign governments, who took risks many times to support us. And he has put our officers and facilities, domestic and abroad, in jeopardy.”
Schulte's motivations appear to be one of hatred towards the CIA and his now former colleagues. The hacker still has an ongoing court case, where he is accused of possession of child exploitation material, which investigators claim to have found on his laptop during the searches.
