🔴 Engineer sentenced for locking over 3,000 devices on employer network

A former core infrastructure engineer at an industrial company headquartered in New Jersey was sentenced to 32 months in prison for locking thousands of devices on his employer's network in a ransomware-style attack.

57-year-old Daniel Rhyne from Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty to his role in a failed extortion plot targeting the New Jersey company that employed him after being arrested in August 2024 and released after his initial appearance in federal court.

According to court documents, he remotely accessed the company's network without authorization using an administrator account between November 8 and November 25 and scheduled tasks on the domain controller that changed the password of the administrator account to "TheFr0zenCrew!", deleted 13 domain admin accounts, and changed the passwords for 301 domain user accounts to "TheFr0zenCrew!".