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Infrastructure Engineer Gets 32 Months for Trying to Ransom His Own Employer

Daniel Rhyne, a 59-year-old infrastructure engineer at a New Jersey industrial firm, was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison for sabotaging his own company's systems and attempting to extort $750,000 in bitcoin. In November 2023, he used scheduled tasks to lock administrators out of thousands of accounts and servers, then sent a ransom demand threatening to shut down 40 servers per day unless payment was made. The FBI traced the attack to Rhyne's residential IP address through internal logs and forensic analysis, leading to his arrest and eventual guilty plea.

A former industrial firm engineer has been handed a 32-month federal prison sentence after attempting to extort his own employer out of $750,000 in bitcoin. Daniel Rhyne, 59, of Kansas City, Missouri, pleaded guilty to extortion and intentional damage to a protected computer. The sentencing was handed down on September 28, 2026, by District Judge Michael A. Shipp in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey.

Rhyne had been a core infrastructure engineer at a Somerset County, New Jersey firm serving sectors ranging from oil and gas to biopharmaceuticals and food production. He had the kind of deep system access that makes insider threats genuinely dangerous.

In November 2023, he used that access to set up a series of scheduled tasks on the company's domain controller. The tasks were designed to delete 13 domain administrator accounts, lock out over 300 user accounts, and reset local administrator passwords across 254 servers and more than 3,000 workstations. The replacement password of choice: 'TheFr0zenCrew!'. Creative.

The tasks executed on the afternoon of November 25. Within the hour, staff began receiving emails from an external address with the subject line 'Your Network Has Been Penetrated'. The message claimed backups had been wiped and threatened to shut down 40 servers per day for ten days unless 20 bitcoin changed hands. At the time, that was roughly $750,000.

The company did not pay. Instead it started pulling logs, cross-referencing internal network activity with physical access records, and brought in the FBI. That turned out to be a fairly straightforward exercise. The unauthorised activity traced directly back to Rhyne's residential IP address in Warren County, New Jersey.

FBI Special Agent Timothy Lee filed a criminal complaint in August 2024. Rhyne was arrested later that month in Kansas City, where he had relocated after leaving the firm. He pleaded guilty in April 2026.

Thirty-two months in federal prison is where that plan ended up.

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