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.
