A former executive at a company that sells zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits to the United States and its allies pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to selling trade secrets worth at least $1.3 million to a buyer in Russia, according to US prosecutors.
Peter Williams, a 39-year-old Australia native who resides in the US, faced two charges related to the theft of trade secrets. As part of the plea agreement, Williams faces between 87 and 108 months in prison, and fines of up to $300,000. He must also pay restitution of $1.3 million.
Williams will be sentenced early next year. Until then, he will remain on house arrest at his apartment, must undergo electronic monitoring, and is permitted to leave his home for one hour each day, according to the plea agreement.
Williams worked for less than a year as a director at L3 Harris Trenchant—a subsidiary of the US-based defense contractor L3Harris Technologies—when he resigned in mid-August from the company for unspecified reasons, according to UK corporate records. Prior to his time at Trenchant, Williams reportedly worked for the Australian Signals Directorate, during the 2010s. The ASD is equivalent to the US National Security Agency and is responsible for the cyber defense of Australian government systems as well as the collection of foreign signals intelligence. As part of its signals intelligence work, the ASD has authority to conduct hacking operations using the kinds of tools that Trenchant and other companies sell.
This month the Justice Department accused Williams of stealing seven trade secrets from two companies and selling them to a buyer in Russia between April 2022 and June 2025, a time period that coincides in part with Williams’ employment at L3 Trenchant.
The document does not name the two companies, nor does it say whether the buyer, described by prosecutors as a software-based Russian broker, was connected to the Russian government. (L3 Trenchant faces no criminal liability.)
According to the US attorney overseeing the case, Tejpal S. Chawla, the FBI alerted L3 Trenchant sometime in 2024 that some of its software had leaked. As TechCrunch reported last week, Trenchant was investigating an alleged leak of its hacking tools by employees—an investigation that Williams, then general manager of the firm, oversaw, prosecutors said during Wednesday’s hearing.
Williams was voluntarily interviewed by the FBI multiple times this summer, including once on July 2. The same month, prosecutors say, Williams signed a contract with the unnamed Russian company worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, using the alias John Taylor and an email address with the same name. This deal followed a separate contract that prosecutors say Williams signed in June. The FBI again interviewed Williams in August and confronted him about the sale of company secrets, prosecutors said. The prosecution said Williams admitted to the sales at that time.
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