US Companies to Pay Fines for Hiring Russians to Work on Pentagon Software

A four-year federal investigation into a case of Russian programmers who allegedly helped to write computer software for US military communications systems ended this week in multimillion-dollar fines against two companies involved in the work, local media reported.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Monday, the software companies NetCracker and Computer Sciences Corporation agreed to pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to close a Justice Department investigation into the security breach, The Daily Beast reported Wednesday.

Army contractor John C. Kingsley discovered the Russians' participation in the project after he was appointed to run one of the companies in 2010, according to the newspaper.

On at least one occasion, numerous viruses were loaded onto the defense network as a result of code written by the Russian programmers and installed on servers in the secure system, the media outlet said, citing Kingsley’s complaint filed in a US court in Washington, DC in March 2011.

Outsourcing work on Pentagon software to employees in Russia violates both the companies’ contracts and federal regulations that mandate that only US citizens with approved security clearances can work on classified systems.

According to the news outlet, the companies in question refute Kingsley’s accusations.