According to CoinMeta, a former engineer from New Jersey Industrial Company was sentenced to 32 months in prison for attacking his employer’s computer network and demanding Bitcoin ransom. Daniel Ryan, 59 years old, was convicted by U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ship in Trenton on September 28, 2026. In April, he pleaded guilty to ransomware charges related to the threat to compromise protected computers and to intentionally damaging those computers. Ryan was a core infrastructure engineer for the company, responsible for virtual machine hosting. The prosecution has not disclosed the name of the company, which is located in Somerset County, New Jersey, and serves various industries including biopharmaceuticals and oil and gas. Around 4 p.m. on November 25, 2023, the company’s network administrators began receiving notifications of password resets from hundreds of accounts, only to discover that all other domain administrator accounts had been deleted. Forty-four minutes later, employees received an email titled “Your Network Has Been Compromised,” stating that the company’s IT administrator account had been locked, backups had been deleted, and warning that 40 servers would be shut down each day unless 20 Bitcoins (worth about $750,000 at the time) were paid by December 2.