A 57-year-old man from the U.S. state of Missouri has been arrested in reference to a failed knowledge extortion marketing campaign that focused his former employer.
Daniel Rhyne of Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, has been charged with one depend of extortion in relation to a risk to trigger harm to a protected laptop, one depend of intentional harm to a protected laptop, and one depend of wire fraud.
He was arrested within the state on August 27, 2024, following an try to extort an unnamed industrial firm that is headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey, the place he was employed as a core infrastructure engineer.
Per court docket paperwork, some staff of the corporate are stated to have acquired an extortion e mail that warned all of its IT directors had been locked out or faraway from the community, knowledge backups had been deleted, and an extra 40 servers could be shut down every day over the subsequent 10 days if a ransom of 20 bitcoin, then valued at $750,000, wasn’t paid.
“The investigation revealed that Rhyne gained unauthorized access to the company’s computer systems by remotely accessing the company administrator account,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) stated.
“Rhyne then, without authorization, scheduled several computer tasks to be carried out on the network, including changing the company administrator passwords and shutting down its servers. Rhyne controlled the email address used to send the November 25 extortion email to the company’s employees.”
Rhyne is believed to have used Home windows’ internet person and Sysinternals Utilities’ PsPasswd instrument to switch the area and native administrator accounts and alter the passwords to “TheFr0zenCrew!,” prosecutors claimed in court docket paperwork.
Authorities stated the defendant allegedly used a hidden digital machine to remotely entry an admin account that was not solely traced again to his company-issued laptop computer, but in addition to look the net for particulars on the right way to use the command-line to vary the native administrator password and clear Home windows logs.
Rhyne, who made his preliminary look on the identical day of his arrest, faces a most penalty of 35 years in jail and a $750,000 tremendous for all three costs.
