Engineer Gets 32 Months for Bitcoin Extortion Plot Against His Own Employer

In brief

• Former core infrastructure engineer Daniel Rhyne was sentenced to 32 months in prison for attacking his New Jersey employer's network and demanding a Bitcoin ransom.
• His November 2023 email demanded 20 BTC, then worth about $750,000, and threatened to shut down 40 company servers a day 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 engineer at a New Jersey industrial company has been sentenced to 32 months in prison for attacking his employer's computer network and demanding a ransom in Bitcoin, federal prosecutors said Monday.

Daniel Rhyne, 59, of Kansas City, Missouri, was sentenced on September 28 by U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp in Trenton. He pleaded guilty in April to extortion in relation to a threat to damage a protected computer, and to intentional damage to a protected computer.

Rhyne was the company's core infrastructure engineer and its subject matter expert on hosting virtual machines, according to the FBI's criminal complaint. Prosecutors have not named the company, which is headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey, and serves industries ranging from biopharmaceuticals to oil and gas.