PALM BAY, Fla. — A senior executive for a Florida-based defense contractor found security vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit and sold them to a Russian broker, according to federal prosecutors.
According to FBI Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky, Peter “Doogie” Williams, the general manager of Trenchant, a division of L3Harris Technologies, Inc., based in Melbourne, Fla. sold the “U.S. defense contractor’s trade secrets.”
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge AliKhan sentenced Williams, 39, no longer employed by L3Harris, to 87 months in prison, three years of probation, and a $1.3 million forfeiture, which includes watches, jewelry, a house, and cryptocurrency.
“Let this be a clear warning to all who consider placing greed over country: If you betray your position of trust and sell sensitive American technology to our foreign adversaries, the FBI will not rest until you’re brought to justice,” Rozhavsky, of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Investigators identified the buyer as Sergey Sergeyevich Zelenyuk, of Matrix LLC, also known as “Operation Zero,” who paid Williams $1.3 million for eight secrets known as “zero-day exploits” from 2022 to July 2025, records show.
“The tools he compromised were intended to protect this Nation; instead, he auctioned them off to a Russian bidder,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in a statement on Tuesday.
Investigators accused Williams of using an external hard drive to steal the exploits from the network in an office in Sydney, Australia, and Washington, D.C., and later used encrypted channels, records show.
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury announced new sanctions against Zelenyuk and his companies.
Williams pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to two counts of theft of trade secrets on Oct. 29. His restitution hearing is on May 12.
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