The person also hacked into his former employer’s network in revenge, but the story doesn’t end there…

The Register has uncovered a press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California about Miklos Daniel Brody. He used to work for a bank as a cloud engineer. He got two years in prison for hacking into the network and perjuring himself to a government agency (lying to the Secret Service doesn’t make sense…). Brody was fired, but he kept his work laptop and retained access to the network so he could damage the internal network and systems. Brody pleaded guilty in April this year to charges related to both his employment at First Republic Bank (FRB) in San Francisco until March 11, 2020, and his subsequent conduct during the investigation.

He was considered suspicious by the bank’s internal IT security team for having multiple USB devices connected to his laptop (connecting a USB headset, mouse and keyboard to avoid wearing out the laptop’s touchpad and keyboard is not suspicious, connecting a thumb drive or external SSD/HDD is, we don’t dispute that). He moved several files, including pornographic content. The Vice President of Human Resources called him in for a meeting, while Brody said that he had received the devices from friends and that he thought they had the Matrix on them.

Only to be fired the next day. He wrote an email saying that he just wanted to watch a movie and then sleep and maybe go over and copy the latest FRB events, but that didn’t happen. He then claimed that he didn’t know that there could be inappropriate content on those USB devices (how can such a person be an engineer?) He then said that he was sick, couldn’t find the movie he was looking for, was sorting files, and wasn’t aware of any violation of company policy. Then he had another meeting with management, and that’s when he was fired. Only he didn’t have the company laptop they asked for, but he promised to mail it back to the FBI…

But on March 11 and 12, 2020, he accessed the bank’s internal network using his then still active account on the company laptop: he deleted code, ran a script to delete other logs, locked several users from services, emailed himself his proprietary code, and targeted a specific target. It was a senior engineer, A.A., who was being promoted while Brody was expecting that promotion.

After a few hours, the bank’s IT team terminated Brody’s access, and the FRB immediately demanded the return of the laptop, to which he responded by misleading, making excuses, blaming the bank and the IT staff in an email (they had caused him financial hardship during the pandemic outbreak), and filing a false police report that the laptop had been stolen from his car while he was at a gym. He was arrested in March while telling the same story to Secret Service agents. In pleading guilty, he admitted to lying.  Judge Orrick, who presided over the case, determined that the damage to the bank was at least $220,621, sentenced Brody to 24 months in prison, with three years of post-release supervision, and ordered him to pay $529,266 in restitution.

Source: PCGamer