Ex-L3Harris Cyber Boss Pleads Guilty to Selling Trade Secrets to Russian Firm

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 confinement 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. Prosecutors, however, said at the hearing that he was employed by the company or its predecessor since at least 2016. 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 eight trade secrets from two companies and selling them to a buyer in Russia between April 2022 and August 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 Russia-based software broker, was connected to the Russian government.

Prosecutors said that the unidentified Russian company was in the business of buying zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits from researchers and selling them to other Russian companies and “non-NATO countries.” Prosecutors also read a September 2023 social media post by the Russian company that said it had increased payouts for some mobile exploits to between $200,000 and $20 million. A September 26, 2023, post on X by Operation Zero, which describes itself as the “only Russian-based zero-day vulnerability purchase platform,” used identical language.

Operation Zero did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During Wednesday’s hearing, prosecutors also said that Williams reached out to the company using an encrypted email account under the name John Taylor to negotiate deals for the software secrets he sold them. In the plea agreement, they say he signed separate contracts for each sale under the name John Taylor. Prosecutors claim that in one case he even agreed to provide three months’ worth of support or software updates to the products he sold the Russian company, which would earn him additional payments.

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, including source code. As TechCrunch reported last week, Trenchant was investigating an alleged leak of its hacking tools by employees earlier this year—an investigation that Williams, then general manager of the firm, oversaw, prosecutors said during Wednesday’s hearing. As part of that investigation, Tech Crunch reported, Williams conducted a video-conference call with a different Trenchant employee, who was suspected of leaking several zero-day exploits that Trenchant had discovered in the Chrome browser. (This individual denied to TechCrunch that they were the source of any leaks.)

Williams was voluntarily interviewed by the FBI multiple times this summer, including once on July 2, when he described to FBI investigators the most likely way that an insider would have been able to extract the software from the company’s protected server. 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.

Prosecutors assert that Williams made at least $1.3 million from the sale of the trade secrets and have moved to seize his assets, including a home in DC, funds held in several banking and crypto accounts, and a list of luxury items that includes nearly two dozen high-end and replica watches and other designer goods. Prosecutors said that Williams used proceeds from the sale of the secrets to make a down payment on the DC house this year.

Trenchant, known formally as L3 Harris Trenchant, develops hacking tools for the US government and its allies. L3 Trenchant was formed after L3 Technologies purchased Azimuth Security and Linchpin Labs in 2018 and combined the two companies. L3 Technologies later merged with a military communications equipment provider to form L3Harris.

Azimuth was a developer of zero-day exploits based in Australia, and Linchpin Labs was a software firm founded by former intelligence officials from Five Eyes countries. (Five Eyes is a surveillance partnership formed by the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.) Trenchant develops various forms of hacking tools for browsers such as Chrome, as well as Apple’s iOS, Android, and desktop and network computing systems.

Updated 2:43 pm ET, October 29, 2025: Added additional details from Wednesday’s hearing and clarified the number of trade secrets Williams is accused of selling, and the time period during which he is alleged to have sold those trade secrets.

Updated 4:55 pm ET, October 29, 2025: Added details about Operation Zero, a Russia-based zero-day purchasing platform.