https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge Skip to main content The New Yorker * Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Sign In Search * News * Books & Culture * Fiction & Poetry * Humor & Cartoons * Magazine * Puzzles & Games * Video * Podcasts * Archive * Goings On * Shop Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories Close Alert The New Yorker New Yorker Favorites * The Marked Woman * Russia's House of Shadows * The Most Ambitious Diary in History * The Premonitions Bureau A Reporter at Large June 13, 2022 Issue The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker's Revenge A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency's hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues? By Patrick Radden Keefe June 6, 2022 * * * * * Save this story for later. A silhouette of a person typing on a laptop revealed through a series of folder icons. At the C.I.A., Joshua Schulte became so known for his temper that his colleagues gave him a nickname: the Nuclear Option.Illustration by Eiko Ojala * * * * * Save this story for later. Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. In fact, they hold Top Secret clearances and work in defense and intelligence. One of these buildings, at an address that is itself a secret, houses the cyberintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency. The facility is surrounded by a high fence and monitored by guards armed with military-grade weapons. When employees enter the building, they must badge in and pass through a full-body turnstile. Inside, on the ninth floor, through another door that requires badge access, is a C.I.A. office with an ostentatiously bland name: the Operations Support Branch. It is the agency's secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of elite engineers create cyberweapons. "O.S.B. was focussed on what we referred to as 'physical-access operations,' " a senior developer from the unit, Jeremy Weber--a pseudonym--explained. This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or "exploits," designed for individual targets. Sometimes a foreign terrorist or a finance minister is too sophisticated to be hacked remotely, and so the agency is obliged to seek "physical access" to that person's devices. Such operations are incredibly dangerous: a C.I.A. officer or an asset recruited to work secretly for the agency--a courier for the terrorist; the finance minister's personal chef--must surreptitiously implant the malware by hand. "It could be somebody who was willing to type on a keyboard for us," Weber said. "It often was somebody who was willing to plug a thumb drive into the machine." In this manner, human spies, armed with the secret digital payloads designed by the Operations Support Branch, have been able to compromise smartphones, laptops, tablets, and even TVs: when Samsung developed a set that responded to voice commands, the wizards at the O.S.B. exploited a software vulnerability that turned it into a listening device. Published in the print edition of the June 13, 2022, issue, with the headline "King Josh." New Yorker Favorites * The attorney fighting revenge porn. * Pauli Murray was an architect of the civil-rights struggle--and the women's movement. Why haven't you heard of her? * What old money looks like in America, and who pays for it. * An MSG convert visits the high church of Umami. * Why the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas. * Fiction by Donna Tartt: "Tam-O'-Shanter" Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. [keefe-patr] Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of "Empire of Pain." His new book is "Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks." More:Central Intelligence AgencyHackersCodeDataWikiLeaksIntelligence Secrecy This Week's Issue Never miss a big New Yorker story again. Sign up for This Week's Issue and get an e-mail every week with the stories you have to read. E-mail address [ ] Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. 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