‘Ex-employee stole three-quarters of advanced NSA hacking tools’

The American suspected of stealing secrets from the NSA intelligence agency may have funneled 75 percent of the advanced TAO hacking tools. The man worked through Booz Allen Hamilton in the TAO division of the NSA.

The prosecution is likely to file charges against Harold T. Martin III this week, writes The Washington Times. The man was arrested on August 29 and is suspected of having taken secrets from the various government departments where he worked for 20 years. It would be thousands of pages of material and about fifty terabytes of data.

This would include a lot of software from Tailored Access Operations, the NSA division that develops the advanced tools to bombard and invade systems. According to sources, this concerns more than 75 percent of all TAO tools, which would make the theft larger than previously thought. Some of those tools came into the public eye through a group called Shadowbrokers.

The American authorities tracked down Martin after that publication of Shadowbrokers. The man was employed by the US Department of Defense at the time of his arrest, but was previously a contractor in the TAO branch of the NSA through the Booz Allen Hamilton company. Whistleblower Edward Snowden also worked as a contractor for the NSA during his time.