Honolulu Man Pleads Responsible to Sabotaging Former Employer’s Pc Community | USAO-HI

HONOLULU – Casey Ok. Umetsu, Sr., age 40, of Honolulu, Hawaii, pled responsible in the present day earlier than United States District Decide Jill A. Otake to sabotaging his former employer’s laptop community. Sentencing is about for January 19, 2023.

In accordance with courtroom paperwork and data introduced in courtroom, Umetsu labored as an info know-how skilled for a outstanding Hawaii-based monetary firm between 2017 and 2019. In that position, Umetsu was liable for administering the corporate’s laptop community and helping different workers with laptop and know-how issues. As a part of his responsible plea, Umetsu admitted that, shortly after severing all ties with the corporate, he accessed a web site the corporate used to handle its web area. After utilizing his former employer’s credentials to entry the corporate’s configuration settings on that web site, Umetsu made quite a few modifications, together with purposefully misdirecting net and e-mail visitors to computer systems unaffiliated with the corporate, thereby incapacitating the corporate’s net presence and e-mail. Umetsu then extended the outage for a number of days by taking quite a lot of steps to maintain the corporate locked out of the web site. Umetsu admitted he brought about the harm as a part of a scheme to persuade the corporate it ought to rent him again at a better wage.

“Umetsu criminally abused the particular entry privileges given to him by his employer to disrupt its community operations for private achieve,” stated U.S. Lawyer Clare E. Connors. “Those that compromise the safety of a pc community – whether or not authorities, enterprise, or private – might be investigated and prosecuted, together with know-how personnel whose entry was granted by the sufferer.”

“This can be a nice instance of an organization partnering, and dealing with the FBI, to catch a former worker who sabotaged their community for their very own private achieve,” stated FBI Particular Agent in Cost Steven Merrill. “We encourage corporations to incorporate the FBI as a part of their cybersecurity incident plan so we are able to help after they have a cyber incident.”

Umetsu faces a most sentence of 10 years in jail, a tremendous of as much as $250,000, and a time period of supervised launch of as much as 3 years.  Sentences are imposed by a federal district courtroom decide primarily based upon the U.S. Sentencing Tips and different statutory elements.

This conviction is the results of an investigation performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Rebecca A. Perlmutter and Wayne A. Myers are dealing with the prosecution.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-hi/pr/honolulu-man-pleads-guilty-sabotaging-former-employer-s-computer-network