Virginia Brothers Arrested for Government Database Tampering
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that twin brothers from Virginia, Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, were arrested on suspicion of unlawfully dismantling a government database managed by a federal contractor.
Last month, both brothers were indicted for allegedly conspiring to erase databases that contained U.S. government data, as detailed in a release from the Justice Department.
The arrests follow a Bloomberg News report from May that implicated them in data leaks affecting multiple agencies, including the IRS and the General Services Administration.
Interestingly, these brothers had previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges tied to data breaches involving the State Department and a cosmetics company back in 2015.
After serving time in prison, they secured engineering jobs with Opexus, a federal contractor aiding the U.S. government in record processing.
According to the Justice Department, their latest actions occurred post-termination as federal contractors, where they allegedly sought to sabotage former employers and U.S. government clients. This included unauthorized access to computers and issuing commands that restricted others from modifying or destroying databases.
The indictment claims that in February, Muneeb Akhter deleted nearly 100 databases that held crucial U.S. government information, including sensitive federal Freedom of Information Act records and investigative files.
Shortly after purging the Department of Homeland Security database, he reportedly asked an AI tool for guidance on how to clear system logs. This raises some eyebrows, naturally.
Concerningly, the brothers even talked about tidying up their space, perhaps in anticipation of police attention. Records indicate that the company laptop they used was wiped clean before its return to a federal contractor.
Muneeb Akhter is also accused of accessing information from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission without permission and of stealing records from the IRS that included federal tax details for at least 450 individuals.
Sohaib Akhter, on the other hand, faces charges for smuggling passwords that provided unauthorized access to U.S. government computers.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti made a statement highlighting that these individuals exploited their roles as federal contractors to compromise government databases, threatening the security of essential systems and disrupting agency operations.
Muneeb Akhter faces a range of charges, including conspiracy to commit computer fraud, destruction of records, and multiple counts of identity theft. Sohaib Akhter is similarly charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and destruction of records.
