CIA Protected Its Top-Secret Hacking Tools with the Password 123ABCdef
Many people have heard of Joshua Schulte—the man accused of leaking the CIA’s “top-secret” hacking tools. Schulte is currently under arrest, and his case is being handled in court. During a recent hearing, several interesting details emerged about the practices of the American intelligence agency.
According to the prosecution, Joshua Schulte stole extremely valuable and confidential materials directly from the CIA and then passed them to WikiLeaks for distribution. U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking a life sentence for Schulte. However, the defendant’s attorney, Sabrina Shroff, strongly disagrees with this position and has repeatedly pointed out the weak evidence against her client.
According to court documents, Schulte worked under the aliases “King Josh” and “KingJosh3000,” which he also used during his time as a system administrator at the CIA.
This whole situation with access to secret tools at such a serious intelligence agency raised some justified questions: just how poorly does the CIA protect such information and files?
And now for the most interesting part—the password for the virtual machine where the aforementioned tools were stored was a classic example of weak credentials: “123ABCdef.” The root login for the main DevLAN server wasn’t any better—“mysweetsummer.”
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