A former defense contractor executive has been sentenced to seven years in prison in the United States for stealing and selling hacking and surveillance tools to a Russian company. Peter Williams, who previously worked for Australian intelligence and the country's military, admitted to receiving $1.3 million in cryptocurrency between 2022 and 2025.
A former defense contractor executive has been sentenced to seven years in prison in the United States for stealing and selling hacking and surveillance tools to a Russian company. Peter Williams, who previously worked for Australian intelligence and the country's military, admitted to receiving $1.3 million in cryptocurrency between 2022 and 2025.
Williams served as CEO of Trenchant, a division of defense contractor L3Harris that sells hacking and surveillance tools (known as “zero-day vulnerabilities”) to the US government and a limited number of its key allies, united in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, TechCrunch writes .
Trenchant is a team of hackers and bug hunters who dig deep into popular software from companies like Google and Apple. They identify vulnerabilities in millions of lines of code and then develop methods to turn those flaws into actionable exploits that can reliably compromise the products. These tools are commonly called zero-day exploits because they exploit software bugs unknown to the developer; they can be worth millions of dollars.
Williams, 39, an Australian citizen living in Washington, pleaded guilty last year to selling seven Trenchant trade secrets to a Russian company called Operation Zero. Williams was sentenced to seven years in prison on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, and the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against her.
Operation Zero offers millions of dollars for information about vulnerabilities in Android and iPhone devices, as well as in messengers such as Telegram. The company claims to resell the acquired tools exclusively to the Russian government and local companies.
The US Department of Justice alleges that the hacking tools sold by Williams could have allowed the end customer to "potentially gain access to millions of computers and devices around the world."
Between 2022 and 2025, Williams transferred his company's trade secrets in exchange for $1.3 million in cryptocurrency. It is not known exactly what exploits and hacking tools were sold, but Trenchant estimated the losses at $35 million, according to court documents.
