A former engineer from an industrial company in New Jersey, USA, has been arrested for attempting to extort Windows administrators on 254 servers. The individual, identified as Daniel Rain, a 57-year-old resident of Kansas City, Missouri, illegally gained access to the company’s computer systems from November 9 to 25. Rain used the administrator’s accounting data to penetrate the system, changed passwords for accounts of administrators and users, and seized control over the system, making data restoration difficult.
Reports from the US Department of Justice state that on November 25, the company’s employees received an email with the subject line “Your network was your network Hamper.” The email claimed that all IT system administrators were blocked, and backup copies of the servers were removed, rendering data restoration impossible. The message included a threat to disconnect 40 servers daily for 10 days unless a ransom of €700,000 (equivalent to 20 BTC) was paid.