Well now, here’s a tale that oughta make some of our allies squint. The Justice Department just dropped a shoe — maybe a whole boot — on Peter Williams, the former general manager of L3Harris’s cyber shop Trenchant, accusing him of selling off American trade secrets like they were knock-off handbags at a Moscow flea market.
Williams, an Australian by passport and allegedly a grifter by habit, used to run Trenchant — a boutique cyber-ops division famous for selling the kinds of hacking tools that governments pretend don’t exist. You know the type: zero-day exploits, custom malware, surveillance systems with all the plausible deniability money can buy. Useful stuff, if you’re trying to infiltrate a rogue state or your ex-wife’s iCloud.
But according to the feds, starting in 2022 and running through this summer, Williams went from managing secrets to hawking them — eight separate trade secrets, to be exact — from two unnamed companies. And wouldn’t you know it, he apparently found a buyer who spoke fluent Putin.
Prosecutors say he raked in a tidy $1.3 million for his troubles. That’s not just petty cash for lattes — that’s enough for a house, a few luxury watches, some shiny jewelry, and no fewer than seven accounts stuffed with crypto and fiat. All of which the DOJ now wants to seize, thank you very much.
L3Harris, naturally, is keeping its mouth shut. Their statement came in the form of silence — the most eloquent form of corporate PR. To be clear, neither they nor Trenchant have been charged with anything. But you can bet someone in a windowless room at Fort Meade is scrubbing server logs and reconsidering who gets to bring their own thumb drive to work.
For those not familiar, Trenchant was spun up in 2018 after L3Harris snapped up two Australian firms that made cutting-edge hacking tools. These weren’t your garden-variety apps. They built what are known as zero-days — flaws in software that nobody knows about yet, not even the companies that built the programs. Because they’re unpatched and invisible, these vulnerabilities let attackers slip in undetected. That makes them incredibly valuable — sometimes worth millions — especially to intelligence agencies looking to get into foreign systems without tripping any alarms.
Trenchant sold these tools to close U.S. allies — countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — the kind of partners trusted to share intelligence and secrets with Washington. Which is exactly why the idea of a former exec walking those tools over to a Russian buyer isn’t just ugly. It’s a five-alarm fire wrapped in a $10,000 wristwatch.
So when one of these high priests of the digital dark arts gets caught selling to the other team? That’s not just embarrassing. It’s a national security dumpster fire.
To make it even messier, this case trails an internal meltdown at Trenchant earlier this year — an investigation sparked by a leak of hacking tools. Insiders told TechCrunch that a dev got wrongfully accused of leaking exploits, including ones that targeted products like Google Chrome. Whether this Williams caper is the same leak with a different label or a whole separate breach is still unclear. DOJ filings keep it vague — like they’re not ready to show their whole hand just yet.
Next up: arraignment. Oct. 29, D.C. courtroom. Maybe a plea, maybe a show. Either way, the real damage is already done. One of the tightest corners of Western cyber capability just sprang a leak — and Russia, allegedly, came shopping.
While DOJ lays out allegations of a cyber turncoat peddling intel to Russia, not one of the fresh-faced bobbleheads in the Pentagon press pool has asked a single question about it. Not who dropped the ball. Not what was leaked. Not whether any U.S. military systems have been compromised. Just blank stares.
