Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department systems have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs.
The Department of Justice on Thursday said that Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, of Alexandria, Virginia, deleted databases and documents maintained and belonging to three government agencies. The brothers were federal contractors working for an undisclosed company in Washington, DC, that provides software and services to 45 US agencies. Prosecutors said the men coordinated the crimes and began carrying them out just minutes after being fired.
Using AI to cover up an alleged crime—what could go wrong?
On February 18 at roughly 4:55 pm, the men were fired from the company, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Five minutes later, they allegedly began trying to access their employer’s system and access federal government databases. By then, access to one of the brothers’ accounts had already been terminated. The other brother, however, allegedly accessed a government agency’s database stored on the employer’s server and issued commands to prevent other users from connecting or making changes to the database. Then, prosecutors said, he issued a command to delete 96 databases, many of which contained sensitive investigative files and records related to Freedom of Information Act matters.
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