A former U.S. National Security Agency employee has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for taking home classified information that was then allegedly obtained by Russian government agents.

Nghia Hoang Pho, 68 from Ellicott City, Maryland and previously a coder for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit, a unit tasked with hacking computer systems, pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal made in December.

In a complicated tale, the theft of data started with Pho removing and retaining government documents and writings on his personal computer that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret and “Sensitive Compartmented Information.”

Pho had antivirus software installed on his computer from Kaspersky Lab, which detected some of the data he had copied as being of interest. The antivirus software detected Equation malware source code files, the top-security software used by the NSA to spy on users.

At this point, accounts diverge. Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene Kaspersky admitted that the company’s antivirus software detected the Equation malware. But when he became aware of it, he said, he ordered all records to be deleted so that the details could not be shared with third parties — specifically the Russian government.

The U.S. government, however, claimed that Kaspersky has links to and provides information to the Russian government, alleging that the Equation malware made its way to the Russian government via Kaspersky. This all led 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.

Regardless of what happened after Pho downloaded and kept copies of the files, he was charged with making the copies to begin with, a serious federal crime given the security status of the data.

“Pho’s intentional, reckless and illegal retention of highly classified information over the course of almost five years placed at risk our intelligence community’s capabilities and methods, rendering some of them unusable,” Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers said in a statement. “Today’s sentence reaffirms the expectations that the government places on those who have sworn to safeguard our nation’s secrets.”

Another NSA employee who was caught taking home copies of top-secret data, Reality Winner, was similarly sentenced to five years and three months in jail in August.

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