Angry employee shuts down 90% of Citibank servers

Jul 27, 2016 23:55 GMT  ·  By

A Texas judge sentenced Lennon Ray Brown, 38, to 21 months in prison for intentionally wiping out the configuration of nine out of ten Citibank routers, causing the bank's entire network to go down for hours in December 2013.

Brown was one of Citibank's long-standing contractors, and he eventually joined the bank's Texas branch in February 2013, as a full-time employee.

In his job as a computer engineer, Brown's responsibilities were to manage the bank's IT network.

Brown shut down 90% of Citibank's entire North American network

According to court papers, on December 2013, Brown was called in and reprimanded by one of his bosses for his poor work performance.

Later during the same day, authorities say that Brown waited for working hours to finish, and at 18:03 sent commands to the bank's IT network that deleted the configurations for the company's routers.

Brown wanted to wipe out all of the bank's ten central routers, but the code executed only on nine of the servers. Authorities say that his action led to a loss of connectivity for 90 percent of all Citibank's networks across North America, causing massive financial and reputational damage to the company.

Two minutes later, Brown swiped his ID card through the gate and left Citibank's Regents Campus to go home.

Brown wanted revenge against higher management

Other bank officials discovered his actions and filed a complaint with local authorities. Brown did not deny any claims and even sent the following message to one of his co-workers.

  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.  

Brown pleaded guilty and on Monday, July 25, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay $77,200.