Tag Archive for: Wikileaks

Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks

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NEW YORK — A former CIA software engineer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday after his convictions for what the government described as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history and for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos.

The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. He has been jailed since 2018.

“We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced the sentence.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices. Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

In requesting a life sentence, Assistant U.S. Attorney David William Denton Jr. said Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”

Given a chance to speak, Schulte complained mostly about harsh conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, calling his cell, “My torture cage.”

But he also claimed that prosecutors had once offered him a plea deal that would have called for a 10-year prison sentence and that it was unfair of them to now seek a life term. He said he objected to the deal because he would have been required to relinquish his right to appeal.

“This is not justice the government seeks, but vengeance,” Schulte said.

Immediately afterward, the judge criticized some of Schulte’s half-hour of remarks, saying he was “blown away” by Schulte’s “complete lack or remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

The judge said Schulte was “not driven by any sense of altruism,” but instead was “motivated by anger, spite and perceived grievance” against others at the agency who he believed had ignored his complaints about the work environment.

Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars by trying to leak more classified materials and by creating a hidden…

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China calls the US an “Empire of Hacking,” citing 2017 Wikileaks files

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Facepalm: The term “Chinese hacker” has become a common saying in pop culture, but it seems the Asian nation has a similar term for the US: the “Empire of Hacking.” The name appears in a new Chinese report that accuses the CIA of using cyberattacks against China and other countries.

As per The Reg, an investigation called “The Matrix” conducted by the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center of China and local cybersecurity firm 360 Total Security has been published in a report titled Empire of Hacking: The US Central Intelligence Agency – Part I.

The report claims that investigators examining a number of cyberattacks within China captured and extracted a large number of Trojans, functional plug-ins, and attack platform samples alleged to be closely associated with the CIA, revealing an “empire of hackers” under US control, writes the South China Morning Post.

“These cyberweapons have undergone strict, standardised, and professional software engineering management, which is uniquely followed by the CIA in developing cyberattack weapons,” the report states.

But many of the findings come from old information gleaned from a 2017 series of leaks on the CIA by Wikileaks, codenamed Vault7. It included details of the agency’s global covert hacking program, the malware it used, and dozens of zero-day weaponized exploits against a wide range of US and European company products, including Apple and Android phones, Windows, and smart TVs, which were exploited so their microphones could be used as listening devices.

“They have now covered almost all internet and IoT assets globally, allowing control over foreign networks and theft of important, sensitive data at any time,” the report said. “Targets of these attacks include critical information infrastructure, aerospace, research institutions, oil and petrochemical industries, large internet companies, and government agencies in various countries. These attacks can be traced back to 2011 and have continued until now.”

The report also mentions the CIA’s history of trying to…

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Radio Havana Cuba | WikiLeaks Reveals Secret CIA Tools Used to Hack Phones, TVs

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Washington, March 8 (RHC-Xinhua) — WikiLeaks on Tuesday released thousands of documents that it said revealed the secret tools the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used to hack people’s smartphones, computer operating systems and even smart TVs.

A statement from the anti-secrecy organization said that the 8,761 documents were obtained from “an isolated, high-security network” situated inside the CIA’s hacking division, the Center for Cyber Intelligence, in Langley, Virgina.

“Code-named ‘Vault 7’ by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency,” the statement said, noting the leaks detailed “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program.”

WikiLeaks said the leaked documents “have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner”, one of whom provided them to WikiLeaks.

By the end of 2016, it said, the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence had over 5,000 people and had produced more than hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware.

These hacking programs can target “a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows operating system and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

“Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook,” the WikiLeaks statement said.

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An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

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An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate secrets to the public. But in Assange’s absence, another group has picked up where WikiLeaks left off—and is also picking new fights.

For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs’ emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police filesprovided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement “fusion centers,” which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data. It may put DDoSecrets on the map as the heir to WikiLeaks’ mission—or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years—and the inheritor of its never-ending battles against critics and censors.

“Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest,” writes the group’s cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. “We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source.”

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