INFRA
INFRA
INFRA
NSA employee pleads guilty to taking home classified data accessed by Kaspersky
In the latest twist on claims leveled against Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs, an employee of the U.S. National Security Agency has admitted to illegally taking classified data home on his personal computer.
Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Maryland, spent 10 years working for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit, a unit tasked with hacking computer systems. He pleaded guilty as part of the plea deal to one charge of willful retention of national defense information.
Pho stands accused of removing and retaining U.S. government documents and writings on his personal computer that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret and “Sensitive Compartmented Information.”
That computer, according to The New York Times, was likely the same computer on which Kaspersky Labs claims to have inadvertently found Equation malware source code files, the top-security software used by the NSA to spy on users when its software was scanning the PC for malware. Kaspersky said in October that it had obtained the information thanks to the user of the PC downloading malware-laden piracy software. That triggered a system scan that subsequently captured the NSA hacking tools.
Company founder Eugene Kaspersky claims that once he was made aware that the company had obtained top-secret NSA hacking tools, he ordered all records of the code be deleted so that the details could not be shared with third parties — specifically the Russian government. On the flip side, the U.S. government still claims that Kaspersky has links to and provides information to the Russian government, leading to a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe and bans on federal employees using the company’s software by both the Trump White House and the Department of Homeland Security.
The charge over the leak of NSA material isn’t the first time the top-secret spy agency has been in the spotlight over security issues this year. In June, a contractor called Reality Winner was arrested and charged over the leak of NSA documents that alleged that Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit attempted to hack local government election officials.
Pho faces up to 10 years in prison, with a sentencing hearing scheduled for next April 6.
Image: Acid the meme machine/Wikimedia Commons
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