NEW YORK – An Indian citizen working in the US has been charged with fraud for causing damage to the computer systems of a former employer.
Mayur Rele, 37, of New Jersey’s Parsippany is charged with two counts of committing computer fraud and abuse, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman has said.
Prosecutors filed the criminal indictment against Rele for committing computer fraud and abuse by causing ransomware to be intentionally downloaded to computer systems, and other acts to intentionally damage the computer systems belonging to his former employer.
Rele was arrested on Thursday in New Jersey and was arraigned in federal court in the Southern District of New York before United States Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn.
According to the indictment filed in the Manhattan federal court, around September 2017, Rele was a senior manager of cloud and infrastructure in the Information Technology Engineering department of an international technology company with its headquarters in New York engaged in the business of travel booking.
Rele caused another employee’s account to install a ransomware on a server belonging to the travel company. As a result, some of the company’s computers were infected with the ransomware, impairing the availability and integrity of the travel company’s data, systems, and information. This led to the company incurring losses to remediate the damage and restore its system.
Rele then caused certain system logs related to the incident to be deleted, in order to avoid detection. He also deleted a file from the company’s network that was used to organise and integrate data and that stored confidential and critical intellectual property, including source code and financial data in New York.
This also led to significant loss in ticket sales and remediation costs.
