I remember working at a TV station where I got caught in a round of layoffs. Most of us they told in advance, that our last day would be in six weeks, but they laid off an engineer at a smaller station and had him gone immediately. They also deleted his account that day, and that’s when they discovered he was running a lot of station processes through his own account. I think it took the corporate engineers a week to get everything back to a fully operational state.

Update: The company that employed the brothers went unnamed in court documents but was identified in the press as Opexus. An eagle-eyed Ars reader points out that, back in December, the company gave a series of quotes to Cyberscoop about the entire incident. Though Opexus did background checks, the company admitted that “additional diligence should have been applied,” it acknowledged that “the terminations were not handled in an appropriate manner,” and it said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Clearly, the failure here was all-encompassing.

🫪

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, now both 34, had been in trouble before. Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.

After their stints in jail, the brothers worked their way back into the tech world. In 2023, Muneeb got a job with a Washington, DC, firm that sold software and services to 45 federal clients; Sohaib got a job at the same company a year later.

Meanwhile I can't get an interview for jobs paying less than my current salary. What's their secret?

He later asked, “How do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012?” I actually winced when I read this bit.

That was a wild read. Glad they got caught, who knows what scheme they had for the guns.

Why were they storing passwords in plaintext in the databases?!

To be fair, what else could they do with that keyboard.

And why couldn’t they have done that to the student loans system?

Like JFC, they could have instantly made themselves immune from trial-by-jury anywhere in America by doing that one tiny thing.

Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.

I'm not gonna say there were signs that these two weren't the most law abiding of citizens to begin with, buuuuut...

Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password

The more scary part in this story is that the government stores your passwords in plain text!

So basically ANYONE with access to the database can steal your credentials, including employees, the government and any authorities.

Never re-use passwords.

“Eh, they can recover from yesterday,” he said, referring to daily database backups.

But did they recover from backups? Don't leave the most juicy intrigue out of the story.

Its always interesting when people are both very smart and also very stupid at the same time.

Only a living wage can prevent data dumps.

Upper management can't even see it...yet.

In a row?!

Redundant twin brothers to handle the redundant twin backups.

Commits hundreds of crimes then starts bringing up god. Class act.

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, now both 34, had been in trouble before. Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.

They had a track record and found employment in government IT

HR should've been fired for that fuckup.

A case study in why credentials are revoked before firings.

No. A case study against employing known criminals.

Call me sexist but that guy has really girly handwriting

No backups?

Having served time for wire fraud/computer crimes, why didn't their names come up as 'do not hire' during background checks for the computer-oriented companies they got work at?

WHERE do I find that gigantic USB delete key?

This event happened at OPEXUS in February 2025, which is interesting because I immediately assumed the criminal sloppers were employed by the Trump admin.

I’ve never heard of the term “password trafficking” before.

One brother did, the other had his credentials revoked prior to termination. What a dumb headline.