DALLAS
A Dallas man who worked at Citibank Regents Campus in Irving, Texas was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for causing damage to a computer.
The damage caused the shutting down of 90 percent of the bank’s network, according to the Department of Justice.
U.S. District Judge David C. Godbey also ordered that Lennon Ray Brown to pay $77,200 in restitution, according to officials.
Brown, 38, who worked for Citibank first as a contract employee and then, beginning in February 2013 as a full-time employee, pleaded guilty in February 2016 to an indictment charging one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.
At Monday’s sentencing hearing, where the court referred to Brown’s conduct as “criminal vandalism,” the government read a text that Brown sent to a coworker shortly after he shut down Citibank’s system that read, “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.”
According to documents, on December 23, 2013, after having a discussion with his supervisor earlier in the day about his work performance, Brown caused the transmission of the program information, code and command, causing damage to the computer.
Specifically, at about 6:03 p.m. that evening, Brown transmitted a code and command to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers. By doing so, he erased the running configuration files in nine of the routers, resulting in a loss of connectivity to approximately 90% of all Citibank networks across North America, according to officials.
At 6:05 p.m. that evening, Brown scanned his employee identification badge to exit the Citibank Regents Campus, according to officials.