Former First Republic Bank employee sentenced for sabotaging bank's cloud computer system

A former bank employee from San Francisco was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Monday for intentionally damaging his former employer's cloud system and stealing valuable computer code, federal prosecutors said.

Miklos Daniel Brody, 38, pleaded guilty in April 2023 to two charges that he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by obtaining information from a protected computer and by intentionally damaging a protected computer and one charge of making false statements to a government agency, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement.

According to prosecutors, Brody worked as a cloud engineer for First Republic Bank, which is headquartered in San Francisco, until March 2020 when he was fired for violating company policy.

Based on a superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury in December 2022, he used his company-issued laptop -- which he did not return after being fired -- to access the bank's computer network to cause substantial damage.

Prosecutors said Brody deleted the bank's code repositories, ran a malicious script to delete logs, left taunts within the bank's code for ex-colleagues, and impersonated other bank employees by opening sessions in their names.

The superseding indictment also noted that he emailed himself a proprietary bank code that he had worked on as an employee valued at over $5,000. According to prosecutors, the total cost of the damage to the bank's systems is at least $220,621.

in the days and weeks that followed his firing, Brody also filed a police report, lying to the San Francisco Police Department that his company-issued laptop was stolen from his car while he was working out at a gym. He also doubled down on that false allegation in statements he made to U.S. Secret Service agents during an interview following his arrest in March 2021, according to the superseding indictment.

Brody admitted he made a false statement about the company-issued laptop and knew his statement was false at the time, prosecutors said.

Besides his prison sentence, Brody is ordered to pay restitution totaling $529,266.37 and to serve three years of supervised release to begin after his prison term is completed.