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 rely of extortion in relation to a risk to trigger injury to a protected pc, one rely of intentional injury to a protected pc, and one rely 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 mentioned to have acquired an extortion electronic 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 can 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 entry to the corporate’s pc techniques by remotely accessing the corporate administrator account,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) mentioned.
“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 tackle used to ship the November 25 extortion electronic mail to the corporate’s staff.”
Rhyne is believed to have used Home windows’ web consumer and Sysinternals Utilities’ PsPasswd software to switch the area and native administrator accounts and alter the passwords to “TheFr0zenCrew!,” prosecutors claimed in court docket paperwork.
Authorities mentioned 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 online for particulars on learn how to use the command-line to alter 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 high quality for all three costs.
