According to US federal sources and press information, a Hungarian computer scientist was sentenced to two years in prison for deleting his former employer’s code repositories after he was fired from the company. B. Dániel took revenge on his former employer, damaging the bank’s cloud system and stealing valuable computer codes. The case was investigated by the United States Secret Service.
The 38-year-old Hungarian man from San Francisco pleaded guilty in April 2023, based on a statement from US Attorney Ishmael J. Ramsey and Sean M. Bradstreet, Special Agent in Charge of the US Secret Service (USSS).
According to the indictment, he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, obtained information from a protected computer, and intentionally damaged a protected computer. He also made false statements to a US government agency.
According to a superseding indictment filed by a federal grand jury in December 2022, the Hungarian man worked as a cloud engineer at a bank in San Francisco until March 2020, when he was fired for violating company policy.
He worked at First Republic Bank, a commercial bank that employed more than seven thousand people and had annual revenue of $6.75 billion. The bank closed on May 1, 2023 and was purchased by JPMorgan Chase.
According to court documents, the man was terminated after he violated company policy by plugging a USB drive containing pornographic footage into company computers.
According to the supplementary indictment, the man used the company’s laptop until the morning after his dismissal – which he did not return to after his dismissal – and thus gained unauthorized access to the bank’s computer network and caused serious damage. Among other things, the man deleted the bank’s code repository, ran a malicious script to delete records, left taunts in the bank’s code for his former colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their name.
In addition, he emailed himself a bank ownership code whose value exceeded five thousand dollars. At the time of sentencing, the judge put the total cost of damage to the bank’s systems at approximately $220,000 (about 76 million forints).
The superseding indictment also alleges that in the days and weeks after his firing, he engaged in deceptive conduct, including filing a police report in which he falsely claimed to San Francisco police that a company-provided laptop had been stolen from his car while he was on duty. In the sports club.
The man repeated this false claim in his statements to US Secret Service agents during interrogation after his arrest in March 2021. He later pleaded guilty, admitting that he made a false statement about the laptop provided by the company, and that he knew exactly at the time that his statement was false.
In addition to sentencing the man to prison, the judge ordered him to pay a total of $529,000 (182 million forints) in compensation, and after serving his prison sentence, he can only be released on probation for three years. The indictment was the result of an investigation conducted by the United States Secret Service.
