U.S. identifies suspect in major leak of CIA hacking tools | Hacker News Reader

U.S. identifies suspect in major leak of CIA hacking tools

washingtonpost.com

33 pointsuptown7 comments

> But despite months of investigation, prosecutors have been unable to bring charges against the man, who is a former CIA employee being held in a Manhattan jail on unrelated charges.

They don't have enough to bring charges, but they're happy to go to the press with a name?

This is the complaint that led to Joshua Schulte's arrest for Child Porn charges:

https://www.scribd.com/document/379346745/Joshua-Adam-Schult...

On or about March 15, 2017, members of the FBI searched the Residence. During the source of that search, law enforcement officers recovered, among other things, multiple computers, servers, and other portable electronic storage devices (the "Subject Devices"), including SCHULTE's personal desktop computer (the "Desktop Computer")...

During the course of reviewing the Desktop Computer, CACS agents encountered a volume of files in an encrypted contained, approximately 54 GB in size.

... law enforcement personnel were able to defeat the encryption used to protect the encrypted container by entering passwords recovered from a cellular telephone belonging to JOSHUA ADAM SCHULTE, the defendant.

It then goes into some detail regarding the files found, which I didn't have any desire to read.

They resume later with the technical details regarding a VM that was found, with an encrypted partition, which itself contained some VeraCrypt volumes. And how they found the passwords.

And then, to top it off, some incriminating IRC discussions involving the defendant.

In other words, this guys defense that "it wasn't me" is a load of shit.

Yep, along with his admissions during the interview, well, it certainly doesn't look good for him.

I’m curious if the password was in a password manager in the phone (or some other leak), or if he was just dumb enough to use the same password on his VM as he used everywhere else.

I don't know, if you read the IRC chat's it doesn't actually read as I Commit CP, in fact if you take a lot of it at face value, i've seen the same jokes used online (granted in bad taste). The only real question is the point where he watches a video to determine it's nature and says, I don't know you can tell the age. I hardly believe that the evidence here is entirely clear that it was intentional. It's quite plausible that he has a backup image from a server (No older than 2008 based on his TAKEN reference) and there was suspect content. That doesn't excuse his lack of responsibility for it, but i'm not sold that it's entirely a case of someone that was a CP collector.

There are a lot of details missing, a lot of analytic notes on the forensic investigation as well, that when provided would possibly guide an independent investigator to provide other doubts.

I would say that if it was cut and dry, it would have been tried and closed by now, my guess is the evidence there can't be disproven as a negligent backup.

I'm not ready to say he's guilty, but If is determined that he is, I do believe they should throw every charge at him.

This reads like a Mr Robot episode...

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