Harold Martin III, a former contractor has been indicted on twenty criminal counts for stealing governments documents and data or willful retention of national defense information, he was arrested and accused of taking classified information. Martin worked as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, he may have stolen as much as up to 50TB of classified data, which would make it the largest of government secrets stolen in history after having stolen more than half-billion pages of top-secret documents from the U.S. government from 1996 to 2016.
Its alleged by U.S. officials that some of the data stolen included at least 75 percent of an elite hacking toolset that’s used by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO). A group called the shadow brokers leaked the TAO toolset sometime last year.
The whistleblowing site WikiLeaks also pointed out that it received the Shadow Brokers release of NSA hacking tools earlier and that it will be releasing them soon.
Fortunately, officials have not yet attributed Martin to any leaking of data and the only accusation that has been laid against him is on stealing not espionage.
The accusations also point out that Martin’s collection of stolen data included documents from the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the U.S. Cyber Command.
Part of the documents that were identified in the indictment included the daily operations from the NSA, the 2016 Cyber Command Report that details military capabilities and gaps that exist within specific operations, a CIA document from 2008 that details the methods of intelligence sources and collection, and an NSA anti-terrorism operation-planning document.
The former contractor is alleged to have stored all the data on computers and drives at his Glen Burnie, Maryland home. Martin was able to access this data because of the security clearances that was granted to him since he was a contractor with at least seven government agencies. He started his career back in 1993 after serving in the U.S. Navy for four years, he’s set to appear before a federal judge for the hearing in Baltimore on the 14th of February.
