Viruses Infect U.S. Military Communications After Russian Programmers Write Code

Two US firms have been fined with a multi-million dollar suit for employing Russian computer programmers to write computer software for US military communications systems who are believed to have infected the Pentagon’s communication systems with viruses.

US Army contractor John C. Kingsley tipped off the Pentagon in 2011 when he discovered the Russians’ roleafter he was appointed to run one of the firms in 2010, Center for Public Integrity reported Wednesday.

“The Russians supposedly worked for one third the rate the American programmers with required security clearances charged out of greed,” Kingsley alleged. The firms denied the allegations that they did the programming work.

“On at least one occasion, numerous viruses were loaded onto the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] network as a result of code written by the Russian programmers and installed on servers in the DISA secure system,” Kingsley said in his complaint, filed under the federal False Claims Act in US District Court in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 2011.

On Monday, NetCracker and the much larger Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corporation — which had subcontracted the work — agreed to pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to close a four-year-long Justice Department investigation into the security breach. They each denied Kingsley’s accusations in settlement documents filed with the court.