Disgruntled Employee Takes Citibank Offline (2013)

Mon Dec 23, 2013

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Image: A Citibank location with a woman carrying an umbrella walking in front of it

On this day in 2013, disgruntled Citibank employee Lennon Brown took down 90% of their North American servers before leaving work that day.

Earlier that day, Brown’s supervisor had had a conversation with him regarding his performance at work. Two minutes before leaving work, Brown transmitted a command to ten Citibank Global Control Center routers, erasing their running configuration files and resulting in a loss of connectivity to ~90% of all Citibank networks across North America.

Brown pleaded guilty in February 2016 to an indictment charging one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. A text sent by Brown, read during his sentencing hearing, read the following:

“They was firing me. I just beat them to it. Nothing personal, the upper management need to see what the 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.”