Engineer Gets 32 Months for Ransoming His Own Employer

Kansas City man sentenced to prison for sabotaging firm, demanding $750K in bitcoin ransom; caught by FBI tracking.

Oct 12, 2026

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A Kansas City man is heading to federal prison after sabotaging the company he worked for and demanding 20 bitcoin, worth roughly $750,000 at the time. Daniel Rhyne, 59, was a core infrastructure engineer at a New Jersey industrial firm when he secretly scheduled tasks on the company’s domain controller in November 2023.

The tasks deleted 13 domain administrator accounts, reset 301 domain user passwords, and changed local administrator passwords affecting 254 servers and 3 284 workstations — mostly to “TheFr0zenCrew!”. Within an hour, employees received an email from an outside address claiming admins were locked out and backups destroyed, and threatening to shut down 40 random servers a day for ten days unless the company paid.

The company didn’t pay. It ran its own forensic analysis, matched internal logs against physical access records, and brought in the FBI, which traced the activity to Rhyne’s home IP address. Agents filed a criminal complaint in August 2024 and arrested him later that month in Kansas City, where he had since moved.

Rhyne pleaded guilty in April to extortion and intentional damage to a protected computer. He was sentenced on September 28, 2026 to 32 months in federal prison.

Source: SecurityWeek

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