A former bank employee from San Francisco was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Monday for intentionally damaging his former employer’s cloud system and stealing valuable computer codes.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, Miklos Daniel Brody, 38, pleaded guilty last April 2023 to two charges of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by obtaining information and damaging a protected computer and one charge of making false statements to a government agency.
Prosecutors said Brody worked as a cloud engineer for First Republic Bank, which is based in San Francisco, until March 2020 when he was fired for violating company policy.
He used his company-issued laptop, which he did not return after being fired, to access the bank’s computer network to cause damage.
Prosecutors said Brody erased the bank’s code repositories, ran a script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank’s code for ex-colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names.
The total cost of the damage to the bank’s systems is at least $220,621.
In the weeks after he was fired, Brody also filed a police report and lied to the San Francisco Police Department, saying his company-issued laptop was stolen from his car while working out at the gym.
Besides his prison sentence, Brody is ordered to pay restitution totaling $529,266.37 and to serve three years of supervised release to begin after his prison term is completed.
