The United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced today that Nabil Ramssiss was sentenced yesterday to 46 months in prison for intentionally causing damage to a computer and failure to appear.  The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel following guilty pleas on two counts in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(5)(A) and 3146.

Mr. Ramssiss, 29 originally from Casablanca, Morocco and formerly a resident of Los Gatos, California, and later Sylmar, California,  was first indicted by a federal grand jury on June 19, 2002.  He was charged with intentionally causing damage to a computer, unauthorized access to a computer recklessly causing damage, and attempted possession of a stolen trade secret.  After being released on bail, Ramssiss failed to appear as required before Judge Fogel and fled to Sweden.  Ramssiss later returned to the United States and assumed a false identity.  On October 31, 2002, he was arrested in Las Vegas on an outstanding warrant issued by Judge Fogel.  At the time of his arrest, Ramssiss was in possession of numerous pieces of identification in other names.  Ramssiss was then returned to the Northern District of California in custody.  A superseding indictment was filed on December 11, 2002, charging Ramssiss with  intentionally causing damage to a computer, unauthorized access to a computer recklessly causing damage, attempted possession of a stolen trade secret, and failure to appear.  On January 28, 2003, Ramssiss pled guilty to intentionally causing damage to a computer and failure to appear.

According to the plea agreement and the information provided to the Court, the following took place:  In November of 1998, Ramssiss worked at DIVA Systems Corporation in Menlo Park as a subcontractor to conduct a security audit of DIVA's computer systems.  DIVA was in the business of developing and marketing digital interactive video service.  The service allowed DIVA's customers to "rent" movies and other special programming which was delivered digitally to its customers.

Ramssiss' employment was terminated on November 25, 1998.  During the early morning hours of November 26, 1998, Ramssiss made unauthorized access to DIVA's computer system and intentionally disabled 14 Cisco routers that controlled DIVA's wide area network across the United States.  Ramssiss' intentional conduct caused the DIVA network to fail, which required extensive repairs by numerous DIVA employees before service was completely restored on December 14, 1998.    

After that, Ramssiss demanded that DIVA pay him money which he believed was owed to him.  Ramssiss told DIVA officials that he had made back-up copies of DIVA's destroyed router configurations, but he refused to provide them to DIVA unless he was paid.  Ramssiss continued to refuse to return the router configurations even after he was informed that the configurations were proprietary confidential information belonging to DIVA.

Judge Fogel sentenced the Defendant to 40 months in federal prison for intentionally causing damage to a computer and 6 months in federal prison for failure to appear.  Judge Fogel ordered that the 6 month prison sentence run consecutively to the 40 month prison term.  He also ordered that restitution be paid to DIVA (which is now in bankruptcy), and a three year period of supervised release.

The prosecution was the result of an investigation by agents on the computer intrusion squad of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with the U.S. Attorney's Office's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit.  Ross W. Nadel is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the case with the assistance of legal assistants Brenda Hodgen and Lauri Gomez. 

All press inquiries to the U.S. Attorney's Office should be directed to Assistant U.S. Attorney Ross W. Nadel at (415) 436-6778 or Matthew J. Jacobs at (415) 436-7181.