IT Admin Pleads Guilty to Extortion, Faces Five Years in Jail

IT Admin Pleads Guilty to Extortion, Faces Five Years in Jail

Viktor Savtyrev, an IT administrator, faces a maximum of five years in jail following a guilty plea over network extortion. Savtyrev admitted he attempted to extort cash from his ex-employers by threatening a system failure on the firm's  servers. 
 

Savtyrev claimed he had friends in the European hacking community who would crash his employer's servers if it didn't meet his demands. 

 

In his extortion email, Savtyrev stated, "My comrades for a small fee are able to help me out with bridging the firewall security and carry out data destruction and virus outbreak."

 

"I located the names and email addresses of the editors of The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and the Daily News and all of them should be very interested in getting an article about a mutual fund (losing) data because some 'Crazy Russian' (this is the name of the article which I wrote last night) was fired after five years of loyal service."

 

Savtyrev was fired last November and got dismayed over his severance package. If convicted, he would be facing up to five years in jail and damage fees amounting to $250,000 (£172,000).