A former Citi employee who knocked out 90% of the bank's networks across North America after a meeting with his supervisor about his work performance, has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison.
According to prosecutors, on 23 December 2013 Lennon Ray Brown had a "discussion" about his performance in a job at Citibank's Regents Campus in Irving, Texas, that he had been in as a full time employee since February that year.
At 6:03 pm that evening Brown knowingly transmitted a code and command to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers, erasing the running configuration files in nine of the routers, resulting in a loss of connectivity to approximately 90% of all bank networks across North America.
Then, two minutes later, he scanned his employee identification badge to exit the campus.
In February Brown pleaded guilty to an indictment charging one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. He has now been sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $77,000 in restitution.
At his sentencing hearing, a text Brown sent to a coworker shortly after his act of sabotage was read out:
"They was firing me. I just beat them to it. Nothing personal, the upper management need to see what they guys on the floor is capable of doing when they keep getting mistreated. I took one for the team. Sorry if I made my peers look bad, but sometimes it take something like what I did to wake the upper management up."