An individual aged 57 from Missouri has been detained in relation to an unsuccessful data extortion operation directed at his previous employer.
Daniel Rhyne, residing in Kansas City, Missouri, has been accused of wrongdoing for threatening to cause harm to a safeguarded computer, intentionally damaging a safeguarded computer, and committing wire fraud.
On August 27, 2024, he was taken into custody in the state after trying to extort an industrial company located in Somerset County, New Jersey, where he worked as a core infrastructure engineer.
According to legal documents, some company staff allegedly received an extortion email warning that their IT administrators had been locked out or removed from the network, data backups were erased, and 40 servers would be shut down daily for 10 days unless a ransom of 20 bitcoin, equivalent to $750,000 at the time, was paid.
“The investigation exposed that Rhyne illicitly accessed the company’s computer systems by remotely logging into the company administrator account,” mentioned the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) stated.
“Rhyne then, without permission, scheduled multiple computer tasks on the network, like altering the company administrator passwords and turning off its servers. Rhyne was in control of the email account used to send the extortion email on November 25 to the company’s workforce.”
Prosecutors alleged that Rhyne utilized Windows’ net user and Sysinternals Utilities’ PsPasswd tool to edit the domain and local administrator accounts and change the passwords to “TheFr0zenCrew!.”
Authorities stated that the accused supposedly employed a hidden virtual machine to remotely enter an admin account that was linked back to his work-assigned laptop and used to search online for instructions on altering the local administrator password and erasing Windows logs.
Rhyne made his first court appearance on the day of his arrest and could face up to 35 years in imprisonment and a $750,000 fine for the three offenses.
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