Disgraced US gov software contractor found guilty of database destruction


A Virginia man, Sohaib Akhter, faces decades in prison after a jury convicted him of being involved in a scheme to delete approximately 96 databases containing US government data.

The events of the case transpired around two weeks before the twin brothers allegedly involved were fired from their jobs at a software supplier to the US government. Sohaib and Muneeb Akhter, both 34, allegedly worked together on February 1, 2025, to access the account of an unnamed individual who submitted a complaint through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s public portal.

Read more…
Source: The Register News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Google will pay $391M to settle Android location tracking lawsuit

    November 14, 2022

    Google has agreed to pay $391.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit filed by a coalition of attorneys general from 40 U.S. states. The settlement shows that the U.S. attorneys general discovered while investigating a 2018 Associated Press article that the search giant misled Android users and tracked their locations since at least 2014 even when ...

  • US Health Dept warns of Venus ransomware targeting healthcare orgs

    November 10, 2022

    The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned today that Venus ransomware attacks are also targeting the country’s healthcare organizations. In an analyst note issued by the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3), HHS’ security team also mentions that it knows about at least one incident where Venus ransomware was deployed on the networks ...

  • DDoS attacks in Q3 2022

    November 7, 2022

    In Q3 2022, DDoS attacks were, more often than not, it seemed, politically motivated. As before, most news was focused on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but other high-profile events also affected the DDoS landscape this quarter. The pro-Russian group Killnet, active since January 2022, took the responsibility for several more cyberattacks. According to the ...

  • US Treasury thwarts DDoS attack from Russian Killnet group

    November 2, 2022

    The US Treasury Department has thwarted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that officials attributed to Russian hacktivist group Killnet. These are the same pro-Kremlin miscreants that claimed responsibility for knocking more than a dozen US airports’ websites offline on October 10 in similar network-traffic flooding incidents. The large-scale DDoS attack didn’t disrupt air travel ...

  • Ransomware cost US banks $1.2 billion last year

    November 2, 2022

    Banks in the US paid out nearly $1.2 billion in 2021 as a result of ransomware attacks, a marked rise over the year before though it may simply be due to more financial institutions being asked to report incidents. The figures come from the most recent Financial Trend Analysis report on ransomware from the US ...

  • Ransomware is a global problem and getting worse, says US

    November 1, 2022

    The White House has brought together dozens of nations as well as representatives from big tech companies for a two-day summit aimed at figuring out how to tackle the global ransomware problem. “When you look at government networks, as we know — Costa Rica; Montenegro; Bank of Zambia; the city of Palermo, Italy, — this is ...