Vault 8 | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A former software engineer with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been sentenced to 40 years in prison by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) for transmitting classified documents to WikiLeaks and for possessing child pornographic material. Joshua Adam Schulte, 35, was originally charged in June 2018. He was  found guilty  in July 2022. On September 13, 2023, he was  convicted  on charges of receiving, possessing, and transporting child pornography. In addition to the prison term, Schulte has been sentenced to a lifetime of supervised release. "Schulte's theft is the largest data breach in the history of the CIA, and his transmission of that stolen information to WikiLeaks is one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the U.S.," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said . The sensitive information shared by Schulte included a tranche of  hacking tools and exploits  that were denominated as  Vault 7  and 

Almost two months after releasing details of 23 different secret CIA hacking tool projects under Vault 7 series , Wikileaks today announced a new Vault 8 series that will reveal source codes and information about the backend infrastructure developed by the CIA hackers. Not just announcement, but the whistleblower organisation has also published its first batch of Vault 8 leak, releasing source code and development logs of Project Hive —a significant backend component the agency used to remotely control its malware covertly. In April this year, WikiLeaks disclosed a brief information about Project Hive , revealing that the project is an advanced command-and-control server (malware control system) that communicates with malware to send commands to execute specific tasks on the targets and receive exfiltrated information from the target machines. Hive is a multi-user all-in-one system that can be used by multiple CIA operators to remotely control multiple malware implants used

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac