Man gets 3 years for hacking former employer’s servers

SHARE Man gets 3 years for hacking former employer’s servers
The Dirksen Federal Courthouse

Dirksen Federal Courthouse, 219 S. Dearborn St. File photo. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

Sun-Times file

A man has been sentenced to three years in prison for hacking the servers of a north suburban industrial supply company after he was fired in 2016.

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew F. Kennelly handed down the sentence Wednesday to 35-year-old Edward Soybel for his hacks against Lake Forest-based W.W. Grainger Inc., according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

“Defendant’s crimes were not an isolated lapse of judgement or one-off outburst,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Eichenseer wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “He essentially declared cyber war on Grainger, not out of principle or for financial gain, but out of spite.”

Soybel was convicted in December 2018 of 10 counts of intentionally damaging protected computers, one count of attempting to cause damage to protected computers and one count of attempting to access protected computers without authorization, prosecutors said.

He illegally accessed Grainger’s servers in 2016, the U.S. attorney’s office said. He damaged the company’s automated inventory management program, caused system outages and locked out users, costing the company at least $300,000.

Soybel worked as a technical support contractor at Grainger’s facility in Niles from November 2014 to February 2016, when he was terminated, prosecutors said. His access to the servers was deactivated when his employment ended, but he used usernames and passwords stolen from former coworkers to hack into them multiple times over several months starting in July 2016.

Soybel was released on bond following his 2016 arrest, but was taken back into custody at the start of his trial last December when authorities discovered a video online of him making threats to law enforcement, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

He wasn’t charged for the threats, but they were considered an “aggravating factor” in the court’s decision to revoke his bond and in the judge’s sentencing, prosecutors said.

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