A federal jury convicted Sohaib Akhter, 34, of Alexandria, Virgina, on charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, password trafficking, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He will be sentenced in September. And last month his brother, Muneeb, signed an agreed statement of facts about the siblings’ activities in response to several charges against him. But according to documents from the case provided on the Free Law Project’s archive of court data, The Court Listener, Muneeb is now trying to have the charges dismissed.
Still, the incident has led one expert, Robert Enderle of the Enderle Group, to say, “it should serve as a wake-up call: Organizations must not only tighten their internal controls, but also begin accounting for how AI tools can be weaponized against them, and these AI tools need far stronger guardrails than they currently have.”
The statement of facts
According to the statement of facts Muneeb agreed to, but now disputes, he and his brother, Sohaib, worked for an unnamed company in Washington, DC that provided software and services to more than 45 US government agencies, including hosting data for some federal clients. They included the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Homeland Security, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
On Feb 18, 2025, both brothers were terminated by the company after it discovered Sohaib had been convicted nine years earlier of a felony. After the firing, they both allegedly tried to harm their former employer by accessing computers without authorization, deleting databases and destroying evidence of their work. In his statement of facts this year, Muneeb admitted to deleting 96 databases.
