A former systems administrator who worked for the US Navy’s nuclear reactor department is accused of infiltrating government networks using the Navy’s own computers and posting links to the materials he found on Twitter.

Nicholas Paul Knight, 27, was allegedly the leading member of a blackhat hacker group, along with Daniel Trenton Krueger, 20, that called itself Team Digi7al. The group, according to court papers obtained by The Register, was a “criminal association organized to hack protected computers, steal sensitive and private information, make unauthorized public disclosures of that stolen…information and commit various others crimes related to its hacking activities.”

Prosecutors say the pair, with help from other members of Team Digi7al, hacked the Navy’s SWM database, which held information about 220,000 Navy sailors. Others alleged targets included the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a military mapping agency, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a government-run developer that build the atomic bombs dropped during World War II.

Knight, a Virginia native, has been portrayed as the group’s ringleader in part because of the prosecution’s claim that he attacked a Navy database during while on active duty serving aboard the USS Harry S. Truman, one of the Navy’s ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

RT