The former head of an American company that develops hacking and surveillance tools has publicly confirmed: he stole and sold technologies capable of hacking into millions of computers and devices around the world. U.S. prosecutors made such statements publicly for the first time.
In October, 39-year-old Australian citizen Peter Williams pleaded guilty to selling eight exploits that he stole from Trenchant – a unit of the American defense contractor L3Harris, which sells its tools for government surveillance to the U.S. government and its closest allies. Williams said he earned more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from these sales for the years 2022–2025, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a court filing released on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said Williams’s actions “directly harmed” the U.S. intelligence community by selling the exploits to a Russian company that has the Russian government among its clients.
Although it had previously been known that Williams sold Trenchant exploits – software that uses vulnerabilities in other software to gain access to a computer or device – prosecutors now say these tools could have been used for government surveillance, cybercrime, and ransomware attacks around the world.
«I made decisions that directly violated the values I believed in and the trust that my family, colleagues, and friends had placed in me,» Williams wrote. «Now I understand that I allowed myself to ignore duties and training, and did not seek help when I realized I was moving in the wrong direction.»
In response to the prosecutors’ memo, Williams filed a letter to the judge explaining his decisions and requesting leniency. His attorney John Rowley said that none of the stolen tools were classified, and there was no evidence that Williams knew the tools would land in the hands of governments of Russia or other countries.
After that, the FBI gathered evidence – from cryptocurrency payments and the alias used to the Russian broker to the contract with the broker – and conducted searches at Williams’s in August.
The Russian broker, reportedly known as Operation Zero, offers up to $20 million for exploits to hack Android and iPhone and says it will sell them only to the Russian government and local organizations. The broker did not respond to requests for . Prosecutors described him as “one of the most dangerous exploitation brokers in the world” and noted that Williams chose him “because they pay the most.”
«Prosecutors described the unnamed broker as ‘one of the most expensive exploitation brokers in the world,’ and said Williams chose him ‘because, in his own words, they pay the most.’
“The drive for more money, a better lifestyle, and luxury items could not satisfy him, so he decided to risk everything to satisfy these ambitions,” the prosecutors concluded.
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