Eric Gunnar Gisse, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, was arrested and charged with violating the Computer Security Act after installing backdoors on 2,723 servers belonging to his former employer, web hosting company Hostgator.
According to the data presented by Ars Technica, Gisse worked at the company as a mid-level manager between September 2011 and February 2012.
Shortly after, Hostgator came under fire after discovering malicious applications that had been created to allow the suspect to remotely connect to the company's servers. The application that provided backdoors was disguised as a very popular Unix tool to avoid suspicion.
Gisse apparently used Hostgator's SSH key to gain root access to their systems.
Hostgator representatives said the malware had infected their systems for less than a month and said there was no evidence it had been used to access their customers' content.
