Daniel Rhyne, 59, pleaded guilty on April 1, 2026, in Trenton, New Jersey, before U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp. Rhyne admitted to ruining the systems of his old industrial employer in New Jersey in an attack that started in November 2023. He created an unauthorized virtual machine so he could access the domain controller from afar.

He set up scheduled tasks from this hidden place to slowly take apart the victim's network. These bad tasks were set up to delete 13 domain administrator accounts and change the passwords of 301 users to the same phrase: "TheFr0zenCrew!" This piece of information later became very important evidence against him in court.

The message asked for 20 Bitcoin, which was worth about $750,000 at the time, and said that the servers would shut down every day for ten days if the ransom wasn't paid. The email account he used to blackmail people had the same password as the scripts he used to attack them, "The Fr0zen crew!" This directly linked him to the crime.

After pleading guilty, he is now waiting to be sentenced. His federal charges include both hacking into computers without permission and extortion. The attack cut off 254 Windows servers and 3,284 employee workstations, which caused a lot of problems for the business at a very important time.