Threat Management

Yijia Zhang sentenced to 31 months under CFAA

A federal district judged sentenced permanent U.S. resident Yijia Zhang to 31 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when he stole electronic documents from his financial services company employer.

No customer information was taken nor was there evidence that Zhang, a citizen of the People's Republic of China, had passed them along or that they had been used to harm his employer.

Not only must Zhang serve the sentence, Judge Legrome D. Davis ordered him to pay $100,000 in restitution to the company, according to a release from the Department of Justice. Zhang pleaded guilty to the crime in October 2015 after deleting the stolen files from a server in 2010. By deleting the files, the server crashed and its log files were overwritten.

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