Peter Williams, a former president of a U.S. defense contractor, was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison for stealing his former company's hacking and surveillance tools and selling them to a Russian company.
Reporters from Bloomberg and CyberScoop first reported Williams' sentence.
Williams is the general manager of Trenchent, a division of defense contractor L3Harris, which sells hacking and surveillance tools, commonly known as zero-days, to the U.S. government and a select group of key allies known as the Five Eyes, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Last year, Williams, 39, an Australian national who lives in Washington, D.C., pleaded guilty to selling seven of Trentint's trade secrets to a Russian broker. Prosecutors did not name the company at the time, but the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed on Tuesday that the broker was Operation Zero and announced sanctions against it.
Operation Zero offers millions of dollars for details of security vulnerabilities in Android and iPhone devices and messaging apps such as Telegram. Operation Zero claims to exclusively resell the tools it acquires to the Russian government and local companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice claimed that the hacking tools Williams sold could give end customers “potential access to millions of computers and devices around the world.” Williams, who previously worked for Australia's spy agencies and the country's military, admitted to making $1.3 million from selling cryptocurrencies between 2022 and 2025.
Lawyers for L3Harris and Williams did not respond to requests for comment.
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