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NSA employee who worked on hacking tools at home pleads guilty to spy charge
Source: Washington Post
NSA employee who worked on hacking tools at home pleads guilty to spy charge
By Ellen Nakashima December 1 at 7:05 PM
A National Security Agency employee who worked at home without authorization on sensitive hacking tools pleaded guilty Friday to violating the Espionage Act — a security breach that the agency was tipped off to by Israeli cyberspies.
Federal prosecutors said they will seek an eight-year sentence for Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Md., for willful detention of national defense information.
Pho’s case is noteworthy not only because it is one of several significant breaches at the NSA but also because he was using anti-virus software from a Russian firm on his computer — software the agency never deployed on its computers for fear it could enable Russian government spying.
The U.S. government and Congress this year have moved to ban the use of Kaspersky Lab anti-virus products from federal government computers.
Pho, a naturalized citizen, worked as a developer in Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the agency’s elite hacking unit, which gathers intelligence by penetrating the computers of foreign governments and other targets overseas. The unit is now called Computer Network Operations.
-snip-
By Ellen Nakashima December 1 at 7:05 PM
A National Security Agency employee who worked at home without authorization on sensitive hacking tools pleaded guilty Friday to violating the Espionage Act — a security breach that the agency was tipped off to by Israeli cyberspies.
Federal prosecutors said they will seek an eight-year sentence for Nghia Hoang Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Md., for willful detention of national defense information.
Pho’s case is noteworthy not only because it is one of several significant breaches at the NSA but also because he was using anti-virus software from a Russian firm on his computer — software the agency never deployed on its computers for fear it could enable Russian government spying.
The U.S. government and Congress this year have moved to ban the use of Kaspersky Lab anti-virus products from federal government computers.
Pho, a naturalized citizen, worked as a developer in Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the agency’s elite hacking unit, which gathers intelligence by penetrating the computers of foreign governments and other targets overseas. The unit is now called Computer Network Operations.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-employee-who-worked-on-hacking-tools-at-home-pleads-guilty-to-spy-charge/2017/12/01/ec4d6738-d6d9-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html