Ex-CIA engineer Joshua Schulte convicted over massive ‘Vault 7’ leak in 2017

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

On Wednesday, a jury in New York convicted ex-Central Intelligence Agency engineer Joshua Schulte on all nine charges he faced, as a result of the largest leak in agency history. A trove of tactics and exploits the CIA used to hack its targets' computers, phones, and smart TVs were exposed in the files and information shared by the whistle blower.

Maintaining the security of our nation's cyber capabilities is of paramount importance according to a statement from the CIA. It is important to the security of the American people and it is also important to our advantage. Unauthorized disclosures endanger US personnel and operations, as well as equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.

The subject of a lengthy profile in the New Yorker that described him asabrasive and then went into far worse details has been in jail ever since.

The Operations Support Branch (OSB), where Schulte worked and built hacking tools, was described in the article. According to the report, investigators were able to get evidence against him through his own carelessness, like storing passwords on his phone.

The trouble investigators had obtaining the Vault 7 documents was due to the fact that they remained classified even though they were publicly available on the internet.

He was accused of stealing national defense information and sending it to the website. In 2020, the government's first attempt at prosecuting Schulte ended in a mis trial as a jury convicted him on contempt of court charges but couldn't agree on the rest.

The second trial ended with Schulte representing himself. He was found guilty of gathering, stealing, and transmitting classified information and of lying to investigators about it. He will not be sentenced until the other charges are resolved.

According to the Associated Press, prosecutors argued that Schulte took revenge on the CIA by stealing and leaking the same exploits he'd been a part of. He argued that he was being scapegoated for the government's failure to protect hacking tools. The Washington Post reported in 2020 that an internal investigation by the CIA found security in the unit was "woefully lax," with users sharing admin-level passwords. Hundreds of people had access to the information that could have been used to make the leaks.

In a statement released after the verdict, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said that when Schulte began to harbor resentment towards the CIA, he covertly collected those tools and provided them to the public. He said thatSchulte had been convicted for one of the most damaging acts of espionage in American history.