A United States federal judge has sentenced Joshua Adam Schulte, a former CIA employee, to 40 years in prison for one of the largest disclosures of classified information in U.S. history. Schulte worked as a software developer for the CIA’s cyber operations division from 2012 to 2016, where he built hacking tools for intelligence gathering.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an internal dispute in 2016 led to Schulte’s administrator privileges being revoked. However, he had secretly opened a backdoor to maintain access. Using this, Schulte stole the CIA’s entire archive of cyberweapons and tools, known as Vault 7. He then transmitted this data, the largest breach in CIA history, to WikiLeaks in 2017.
