- Former engineer Daniel Rhyne was sentenced to 32 months in prison for Hacking his employer’s network and demanding a Bitcoin ransom.
- His November 2023 email demanded 20 BTC, then worth about $750,000, threatening to shut down 40 servers daily for 10 days.
- An FBI complaint traced the attack to a hidden virtual machine accessed from Rhyne’s company laptop, with passwords reset to “TheFr0zenCrew!”.
A former core infrastructure engineer for a New Jersey industrial company has been sentenced to 32 months in prison for attacking his employer’s network and demanding a Bitcoin ransom, federal prosecutors said Monday. Daniel Rhyne, 59, of Kansas City, Missouri, was sentenced on September 28 after pleading guilty in April to extortion and intentional damage to a protected computer.
Prosecutors have not named the company, which serves industries from biopharmaceuticals to oil and gas. On November 25, 2023, network administrators received hundreds of password reset notifications and found all other domain administrator accounts deleted.
Forty-four minutes later, an email headed “Your Network Has Been Penetrated” demanded 20 BTC, then about $750,000, or it would shut down 40 servers daily for 10 days. According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, the attack traced back to a hidden virtual machine created on November 9.
Its password was “TheFr0zenCrew!”, the same set on administrator accounts, 301 user accounts, and the email sending the demand. The FBI linked the machine to Rhyne through his company laptop, noting browsing stopped whenever activity occurred on the hidden machine.
On the attack day, Rhyne’s laptop connected from his home IP minutes before the session that set destructive tasks. Days earlier, the machine’s user had searched for “how to clear all windows logs from command line” and “how to remotely shutdown a computer using cmd.”
Rhyne had faced a maximum of five years on the extortion count and 10 years on the damage count. He was also charged with wire fraud, though that count did not appear in the two-count information to which he pleaded guilty.
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