Cyber security official downloaded animated child porn on secure network

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Credits: ABC

A former senior cyber security official has been sentenced to a suspended prison term for using a secure government network to download animated child pornography.

Canberra man Jeffrey Alexander Donald, 65, was an assistant director within the cyber and information security branch of the Australian Signals Directorate.

On January 16 last year, routine analysis conducted within the network identified Donald’s account as having “conducted a number of internet searches which were determined to be inconsistent with appropriate use of a Commonwealth IT system”, according to an agreed statement of facts tendered in court.

Further analysis uncovered about 8000 files that had been stored on the man’s work computer drive between 2001 and 2017. Some of those files contained child pornography material.

In January 2018, the defendant was put on leave from his role within the directorate and his access to sensitive systems was removed.

A defence security analyst gave police a disc containing a capture of Donald’s drive.

Police examined the capture of the Richardson man’s drive located within his secure network account. After the analysis, seven images, four text-based documents and 12 PowerPoint slides that were stored on the drive were classified as child pornography.

The material was categorised using the Australian national victim image library classification and there were 22 instances of animated or virtual material and one of sadism, bestiality or child abuse.

The rest of the images located on the defendant’s drive were categorised as being category 7 (non-illegal), category 8 (adult pornography) or category 9 (ignorable).

Donald was arrested in March and later pleaded guilty to the charges of possessing child exploitation material and using a carriage service to download child exploitation material.

On Friday in the ACT Supreme Court, Justice John Burns sentenced Donald to a total of 13 months in jail, to be suspended immediately on him entering into good behaviour orders.