Thanks for the info. I can imagine a NYT reporter being contacted by somebody who has a job in the pentagon but does not understand what cyber ops is really doing. Assuming that the reporter had such a contact, that contact should be in real legal jeopardy. Or, as you suggest, maybe the NYT just invented the whole thing.
Depending on what this source said, he/she could have divulged TS:SCI information at the very least, maybe even sub-gamma. That is highly illegal. Given the nonsense in this article, though, even if that did happen, the reporter was too dumb to understand what the information meant and thus this idiotic article was born.