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 menace to trigger injury to a protected pc, one depend of intentional injury to a protected pc, and one depend of wire fraud.
He was arrested within the state on August 27, 2024, following an try and 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 obtained 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 a further 40 servers can be shut down every day over the following 10 days if a ransom of 20 bitcoin, then valued at $750,000, wasn’t paid.
“The investigation revealed that Rhyne gained unauthorized entry to the corporate’s pc programs by remotely accessing the corporate administrator account,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) stated.
“Rhyne then, with out authorization, scheduled a number of pc duties to be carried out on the community, together with altering the corporate administrator passwords and shutting down its servers. Rhyne managed the e-mail deal with used to ship the November 25 extortion e mail to the corporate’s staff.”
Rhyne is believed to have used Home windows’ internet consumer and Sysinternals Utilities’ PsPasswd device to change 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 additionally to look the online for particulars on learn how 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 wonderful for all three fees.
