A former core infrastructure engineer at a New Jersey industrial company has been sentenced to 32 months in prison for conducting a ransomware-style attack on his employer’s network. Daniel Rhyne, 57, from Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty to an extortion plot after being arrested in August 2024. Between November and December 2023, he remotely accessed the company’s systems using administrator credentials and locked thousands of devices by changing passwords on domain and local administrator accounts.
Rhyne’s actions blocked access to 254 servers and 3,284 workstations. He also deleted server backups and sent a ransom email demanding 20 bitcoins, approximately $750,000 at the time, threatening to shut down 40 random servers daily unless payment was made. Investigators discovered that Rhyne had searched online for information about changing passwords, deleting accounts, and clearing logs before executing his attack. The case is one of several recent prosecutions involving employees attempting to extort their employers through cyber attacks.
Source: Read the full story at BleepingComputer
This summary was written with AI assistance from the linked source.
Send this to yourself, or to someone who should see it
Enter your email and we will send you a link to this article.
