OK, I think I found the original thing Rockenhaus was convicted of. Back in 2014, Rockenhaus worked for a travel booking company. He was fired. He used stale VPN access to connect back to the company’s infrastructure, and then detached a SCSI LUN from the server cluster, crashing it. The company, not knowing he was involved, retained him to help diagnose and fix the problem. During the investigation, the company figured out he caused the crash, and terminated him again. He then somehow gained access to their disaster recovery facility and physically fucked up a bunch of servers. They were down a total of about 30 days and incurred $500k in losses.
(He plead this case out, so these are I guess uncontested claims).
From tptacek on ycombinator:
Yeah, not surprised. The original poster clearly “forgot” to mention some critical details in order to make themselves look like victims.
I wouldn’t doubt the FBI did some unethical things, but let’s not pretend the claim is trustworthy.