Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer, was sentenced to in prison and ordered to pay $529,000 in restitutionfor deleting his former employer's code repositories. The engineer wanted revenge on his employer for firing him.
Brody worked at First Republic Bank, which was a commercial bank in the US, which closed on May 1, 2023 and was sold to JPMorgan Chase.
According to a statement from the US Department of Justice (DoJ), Brody was fired on March 11, 2020, from First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco. He worked as a cloud engineer at the bank.
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Court documents state that Brody was fired for violating bank policies after he connected a USB with pornographic content to company computers.
After being fired, the cloud engineer allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-active account , connected to the bank's computer network, and caused damages estimated to exceed $220,000 (according to the charges).
“ Among other things, Brody deleted the bank’s code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete log files, left taunts in the bank’s code about former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names ,” the US Department of Justice statement describes
“He also emailed himself a code from the bank where he had worked as an employee, worth more than $5,000“.
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His access to the bank was terminated on March 12, 2020, one day after his dismissal. By then, defendant Miklos Daniel Brody had done the following:
- It executed a malicious script named “dar.sh” to delete data from FRB servers.
- Delete git logs and git commit history for this script
- He gained access to the bank 's GitHub repository and deleted the hosted code.
- Introduced “mocking” into the code
- He impersonated another cloud engineer to gain access to the company's network and make configuration changes.
After all of this, the defendant falsely reported to the San Francisco Police Department that someone had stolen his company laptop from car (so that he wouldn't turn it in).
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Finally, in April 2023, the cloud engineer pleaded guilty. In addition to the two-year prison sentence and the payment of restitution, Brody will serve three years of supervised release.
Brody's actions are an example of the serious consequences that can result from engaging in illegal activities such as gaining access to networks, infecting them with malware, and unauthorized deletion of sensitive data. Brody was sentenced to prison for his actions, proving that illegal things ultimately lead to punishment. This fact sends a strong message to those who intend to exploit the capabilities they have in computing for illegal purposes.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
