'Disgruntled' engineer gets fired for porn on work laptop, claims he was watching the Matrix, revenge-hacks employer's IT network, lies to the secret service, goes directly to jail

pcgamer.com:

Miklos Daniel Brody, a cloud engineer formerly employed at a bank, has been sentenced to two years in prison for «a network intrusion and for making false statements to a government agency» following a secret service investigation. Seemingly angered by his employer taking disciplinary action against him, Brody kept his work laptop under false pretences after being fired, and used his network access to damage his former employer's internal IT systems.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced the news in a press release trumpeting the investigation (spotted by The Register), which contains some eye-popping details of Brody's malfeasance. Brody pleaded guilty in April this year to the charges, which relate to both the First Republic Bank in San Francisco which employed him until March 11, 2020 and his subsequent behaviour when under investigation.

Brody had been flagged by the bank's infosec team, which alleged he had plugged multiple USB devices into his company laptop and transferred various files including pornography. He was called into a meeting with the bank's VP of human resources, during which Brody claimed that he'd been given the devices by friends and believed they contained the film The Matrix.

Mister Anderson was not fired at this meeting, but the following day. On that same day he sent an email to the HR VP claiming «my sole intent was to watch a movie and then fall back asleep, and maybe view & copy previous FRB event pics to my USB–which I never did.» He goes on to claim, rather unbelievably for a systems engineer, that «I wasn't even aware that those USBs could contain inappropriate content» and claimed he'd been sick, couldn't find the movie he wanted, was just