Core infrastructure engineer pleads guilty in insider attack
🔒 A core infrastructure engineer, Daniel Rhyne, pleaded guilty on April 1 after launching an insider extortion attack that used routine admin tools and techniques to disable systems and accounts. He initiated unauthorized RDP sessions, deleted administrator accounts, changed passwords, and scheduled tasks on the domain controller, then claimed to have erased backups while demanding roughly $750,000 in bitcoin. Security experts say the methods were alarmingly predictable and could have been prevented by immutable backups, strict least privilege controls, and behavioral alerts for high‑risk tools.
