The Operations Support Branch (O.S.B.) is a unit of the cyber-intelligence division of the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

(C.I.A.). It is located on the ninth floor of a secret facility in the suburbs of northern Virginia, west of

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Patrick Radden Keefe Patrick Radden Keefe (born 1976) is an American writer and investigative journalist. He is the author of five books—''Chatter,'' ''The Snakehead,'' '' Say Nothing,'' '' Empire of Pain,'' and ''Rogues''—and has written extensively for many pub ...

described the O.S.B. as the CIA's "secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of élite engineers create cyberweapons" in a June 2022 article for ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

''. The O.S.B. specialises in physical access operations in 'physical access' is gained to electronic devices owned by high value individual targets such as foreign government officials and terrorists. The O.S.B. is able to quickly develop tools that can be utilised in cyberintelligence missions at short notice. The O.S.B. was filled with workspace pranks, like stealing coworkers things, name calling, shoving matches, rubber band and Nerf gun wars. Asked if she was aware of this, the former head of C.I.A.'s Center for Cyber Intelligence Bonnie Stith said she was not. The employees of the O.S.B. numbered about a dozen in the 2010s. Radden Keefe described the extreme secrecy of the O.S.B. at this period as resulting in staff unable to " ... take work home, or talk with anyone on the outside about what they did all day. Their office was a classified sanctum, a locked vault. Like the crew of a submarine, they forged strong bonds—and strong antagonisms". The software engineer

Joshua Schulte Joshua Adam Schulte (born September 25, 1988) is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who was convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, the Vault 7 documents, which ''The New York Times'' called "the largest loss of c ...

was employed by the O.S.B. from 2010 to 2016. He was convicted of being the leaker of the

Vault 7 Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, detailing the activities and capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dating fr ...

documents which detail electronic surveillance and

cyber warfare Cyberwarfare is the use of cyber attacks against an enemy state, causing comparable harm to actual warfare and/or disrupting vital computer systems. Some intended outcomes could be espionage, sabotage, propaganda, manipulation or economic wa ...

tools developed by the C.I.A. Schulte was nicknamed '

Voldemort Lord Voldemort ( , in the films) is a sobriquet for Tom Marvolo Riddle, a character and the main antagonist in J. K. Rowling's series of ''Harry Potter'' novels. The character first appeared in '' Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Ston ...

' during his time at the O.S.B. The leak and publication of the Vault 7 documents was a significant blow to the C.I.A., a senior official likened it to the 'digital' equivalent of the

attack on Pearl Harbor The attack on Pearl HarborAlso known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii ...

in its scope and fallout.

References

{{Central Intelligence Agency Central Intelligence Agency domestic surveillance operations Computer surveillance Cyberwarfare Hacking in the 2010s