A federal judge ordered Peter Williams to pay $10 million in restitution to L3Harris, on top of the $1.3 million he’d already been ordered to repay. Williams had pleaded guilty to stealing seven trade secrets from Trenchant, L3Harris’s spyware and hacking-tools division, and selling them to Operation Zero, a Russian exploit broker that works exclusively with the Russian government.
Williams, 39, was a former Australian intelligence officer who ran Trenchant as its general manager. He used full administrative access to the company’s internal network to siphon out the tools, almost certainly cyber exploits and surveillance technology, and pocketed $1.3 million from Operation Zero. He spent it on luxury watches, a house near Washington, D.C., and family vacations.
The breach didn’t stay contained. After Williams sold the tools, Russian government spies deployed some in Ukraine; later, Chinese cybercriminals used others. Former L3Harris employees recognized the stolen code in cybersecurity research Google published after investigating those attacks. Trenchant told prosecutors it suffered losses of up to $35 million.
Williams was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He also tried to frame one of his own employees for the theft. U.S. prosecutors said he “betrayed” the United States and its Five Eyes allies by handing Operation Zero tools capable of hacking “millions of computers and devices around the world.”
The $10 million order came Wednesday.
— James Okafor