U.S. Citibank Employee Erases the Company's Servers, Crippling 110 Branches

The now former worker has been sentenced to nearly two years in jail after pleading guilty to issuing commands that wiped the configuration files on 10 core routers on the financial institution’s internal network.

The hack that Lennon Ray Brown, 38, executed in December 2013 affected data network and phone access at branches nationwide – about 90 per cent of all Citibank branch offices.

Brown's actions came after he had been reprimanded for poor performance by a manager. 

He uploaded a series of commands to Citibank's Global Control Center routers, deleting the config files for nine of the routers and causing traffic to be re-routed through a set of backup routers. While there was not a complete outage, the re-routing led to "congestion" on the network and at branch offices, according to court records. 

Brown said the following in a text message to a coworker shortly after the incident:

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.