A 26-year-old Hungarian man has been sentenced to more than two years in prison, after he attempted to blackmail Marriot International into giving him a job by threatening to reveal sensitive information about the hotel chain.
Attila Nemeth pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison for transmitting a malicious code to the company and threatening to reveal secrets about the company's computers.
"On 11 November, 2010, Nemeth emailed Marriott personnel, advising that he had been accessing Marriott's computers for months and had obtained proprietary information. Nemeth threatened to reveal this information if Marriott did not give him a job maintaining the company's computers," an announcement from the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement on Friday.
"On 13 November 2010, after receiving no response from Marriott, Nemeth sent another email containing eight attachments, seven of which were confirmed as documents stored on Marriott's computer system," the DoJ added.
Included in the documents were financial and other confidential company details and the damage caused by Nemeth totalled $1m (£632,000), the DoJ said.
Nemeth gained access to the company's systems using an infected email attachment sent to specific Marriott employees&mdash a technique known as 'spear phishing' — which then allowed him to gain access to the system via a backdoor. Using that, he was able to access the proprietary information and emails.
He was caught in a sting operation in which the US Secret Service created a fake employee persona on the Marriott system to communicate with Nemeth. After making further blackmail attempts against what Nemeth thought to be a Marriot employee, he travelled to Washington Dulles Airport and was met by a Secret Service agent for an "employment interview". During the meeting, Nemeth admitted that he had accessed the system, stolen the information and sent emails threatening to publicly release the information.
The judge presiding over his case said Nemeth should serve three years of supervised release once he has completed his prison sentence.
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