Ex Employee of US Govt. Indicted for Stealing and Selling Nuclear Secrets

Rt.com published news on 8th May, 2015 stating that Department of Justice in US (DoJ) has accused a former employee, Charles Harvey Eccleston (62), of the Department of Energy of US and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for attempting to hack computers of government to obtain information regarding nuclear weapons.

According to the charge announced in court recently, Eccleston is accused of having tried to attack more than 80 employee's email accounts of Energy Department in January 2015 with with email "spear-phishing".

Spear-phishing is done by sending fake emails which look genuine but actually it delivers a virus into the computer whenever it is opened. Eccleston is charged because he tried to damage the computer network of the Department and therefore gained entry to information regarding nuclear weapons.

Rt.com published news on 8th May, 2015 quoting John Carlin, Assistant Attorney General, as saying "Eccleston wanted to compromise, abuse and harm computer systems of US government containing sensitive information about nuclear weapons with a purpose of allowing foreign countries to gain access to that information."

Eccleston collected nuclear secrets through his operations of spear phishing and was caught when he tried to sell the same to an undercover FBI agents who was posing as representative of the unknown country. He also went to the embassy of an unnamed foreign country and tried to sell classified information.

Eccleston was fired from NRC in 2010 apparently for bad conduct and performance and since then he had been living in the Philippines. He was detained by the authorities of Philippine in Manila on 27th March, 2015 and deported to the United States to face criminal charges.

Securityweek.com published news on 8th May, 2015 quoting documents of FBI as "When Eccleston was asked that what he would do if Country A was not eager to take the US government information from him, he said that he would go to Iran, China or Venezuela because he believed that these countries would like to have these information".

Eccleston facing upto 50 years in jail for four charges for which he has been accused will be detained till his hearing on 20th May, 2015.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/21/2015