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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Prison for Man Who|Crashed Bank Computers

DALLAS (CN) - A former Citibank employee who took down 90 percent of the bank's networks in North America after a bad meeting with his boss was sentenced Monday to 21 months in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge David Godbey also ordered 38-year-old Lennon Ray Brown to pay $77,200 in restitution for his "criminal vandalism."

Brown pleaded guilty in February to intentional damage to a protected computer.

He started working at the Citibank Regents Campus in Irving as a contract employee in 2012 before being hired full-time in 2013.

Brown "caused the transmission of a program, information, code and command" to a protected computer after the ill-fated meeting with a supervisor about his work performance on Dec. 23, 2013, according to court records.

"Specifically, at approximately 6:03 p.m. that evening, Brown knowingly transmitted a code and command to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers, and by transmitting that code, erased the running configuration files in nine of the routers, resulting in a loss of connectivity to approximately 90 percent of all Citibank networks across North America," prosecutors said in a statement. "At 6:05 p.m. that evening, Brown scanned his employee identification badge to exit the Citibank Regents Campus."

During the sentencing hearing, prosecutors presented a text message that Brown sent to a coworker shortly after the system shutdown.

"They was firing me. I just beat them to it," the text stated. "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."

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