A former U.S. defense contractor executive has been ordered to pay $10 million in restitution to his former employer after stealing advanced hacking tools and selling them to a Russian broker with ties to the Kremlin — one of the most serious leaks of offensive cyber capabilities in U.S. history.
In May 2026, a judge ordered Peter Williams, 39, to pay the $10 million to L3Harris on top of the $1.3 million in restitution he had already been ordered to pay the company. Williams had previously pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Williams was the general manager of Trenchant, L3Harris’s division that develops spyware and hacking tools for the U.S. government and its Five Eyes intelligence partners — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. An Australian citizen and former Australian intelligence agency employee, Williams exploited his “full access” to Trenchant’s internal network to steal seven trade secrets, almost certainly including cyber exploits and surveillance technology.
He sold those tools to Operation Zero, a Russian firm that acts as a hacking-tool broker and says it works exclusively with the Russian government and local companies. Williams made $1.3 million from the sales, which he spent on luxury watches, a house near Washington, D.C., and family vacations. Trenchant told prosecutors it suffered losses of up to $35 million as a result of the theft.
U.S. prosecutors said Williams “betrayed” the United States and its allies by handing tools to what the government calls “one of the world’s most nefarious exploit brokers.” According to former L3Harris employees, some of the stolen tools were later used by Russian government spies in Ukraine and subsequently by Chinese cybercriminals — identifications made after Google published cybersecurity research on attacks in which the tools were deployed.
Williams also attempted to frame one of his own employees for the theft. The new restitution order was first reported by cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter in her newsletter.
Source: TechCrunch