An ex-employee who The deliberately damaged 10 core routers at Citibank has been punished with a near-two-year jail term and a $77,000 fine, following an investigation by the US Secret Service.

Lennon Ray Brown, 38, from Dallas, pleaded guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer and received the 21-month federal prison sentence at a Northern Texas District Court this week. He admitted the charge in February 2016.

Criminal vandalism

On December 23, 2013 Brown sent commands to erase the configuration files on 10 core routers within Citibank’s internal network.

The court referred to the act as one of “criminal vandalism”.

The act resulted in an outage to the bank’s network and phone access, affecting 110 of its North America branches. This constituted 90 percent of its offices.

Capable of damage

Before sending the commands, Brown had been called by a supervisor to discuss his work performance. This, Brown said in a text he sent to a colleague after he committed the damage, signalled to him the company’s intention to fire him, which made him determined to act first.

The text sent by Brown 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.”

Brown had initially been hired by Citibank in 2012 as a contractor before he became a full-time staff employee.