Former DHS official pleads guilty in government employee PII theft

Former Department of Homeland Security Acting Inspector General Charles Kumar Edwards has entered a guilty plea on charges pertaining to the theft of proprietary U.S. government software and databases, which contain personally identifiable information belonging to government employees, according to BleepingComputer. Edwards, who was employed at the DHS-Office of Inspector General between 2008 and 2013 and previously worked at the Transportation Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service-Office of Inspector General, was able to access various systems and databases with information belonging to the agencies' employees, which he then leveraged when he began Delta Business Solutions after leaving DHS-OIG in September 2015, according to the Department of Justice. PII belonging to nearly 246,167 DHS employees and nearly 6,723 USPS employees have been infiltrated by Edwards along with co-conspirators former DHS-OIG IT Specialist Murali Yamazula Venkata and former DHS-OIG IT Enterprise Applications Branch Chief Sonal Patel. "From at least 2015 until 2017, he stole software from DHS-OIG, along with sensitive government databases containing personal identifying information of DHS and USPS employees, so that his company could develop a commercially-owned version of a case management system to be offered for sale to government agencies," said the Justice Department.