A Kansas City, Missouri, man has been sentenced to 32 months in prison for crimes related to a ransom attack on his own business.
The DOJ has announced the conviction of Daniel Rhyne. He had already pleaded guilty to “extortion in connection with the threat to damage a protected computer” and “intentional damage to a protected computer.”
Rhyne, 59, was a key infrastructure engineer at an industrial company headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey. The company provides services to industries in aquaculture, biopharmaceuticals, chemicals, electronics, food and beverage, healthcare, hydrogen mobility, manufacturing and industrial processing, metals, oil and gas, and pulp and paper.
In November 2023, Rhyne placed scheduled tasks on the company’s domain controller that would delete 13 domain administrator accounts; Change passwords for 301 domain user accounts; Change passwords for two local administrator accounts, which would affect 254 servers; and change passwords for two local administrator accounts, impacting 3,284 workstations. The result was that the company was denied access to its systems and data.
Where passwords were changed, this was usually done to “TheFr0zenCrew!”
The planned tasks were completed late in the afternoon of November 25th. Within an hour, certain employees received an email from an external address. The subject line read: “Your network has been penetrated.” It warned that administrators had been banned or deleted, all backups had been deleted, and that unless a ransom was paid, 40 randomly selected servers would be shut down every day for a period of ten days.
Rhyne demanded a payment of 20 Bitcoin, which was worth about $750,000 at the time.
There is no indication that the victim company paid a ransom. Rather, the company immediately began its own internal forensic analysis of any network anomalies, correlating internal logs with physical access records. This involved the FBI, who traced the unauthorized activity directly to Rhyne’s home IP address in Warren County, New Jersey.
This joint forensic investigation provided FBI Special Agent Timothy Lee with enough evidence to file a criminal complaint on August 8, 2024, resulting in Rhyne’s arrest on August 27, 2024 in Kansas City, where he later moved. He pleaded guilty on April 1, 2026, in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, before District Judge Michael A. Shipp.
Rhyne was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison on September 28, 2026 for his role in the sabotage and extortion plot.
Related: Jail sentence for former US soldier who hacked AT&T and Verizon
Related: US court sentences Armenian man to prison for Ryuk ransomware attacks
Related: Ukrainian Conti ransomware developer sentenced to 4 years in US prison
Related: Two scatter spider hackers sentenced to prison in the UK
