A New York IT admin, angry at being laid off, now faces 5 years in prison for sending his former employer  email threats and attempting to extort money from them.

Viktor Savtyrev, 29, pleaded guilty to extortion after he threatening emails and attempting to extort money from his former comapny. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Savtyrev threatened his former employers with computer crashes. He also threatened to enlist Eastern European hackers to launch attacks against his former employer, New York investment firm Third Avenue Management.

“My comrades for a small fee are able to help me out with bridging the firewall security and carry out data destruction and virus outbreak,” Savtyrev wrote in an e-mail to the company, according to the complaint. “I located the names and e-mail addresses of the editors of Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and the Daily News and all of them should be very interested in getting an article about a mutual fund (losing) data because some “Crazy Russian’ (this is the name of the article which I wrote last night), was fired after 5 years of loyal service.”

Unfortunately for Savtyrev, using email was a big mistake. The company promptly turned them over to the FBI and he was quickly tracked down. With layoffs at an all time high, it’s possible that other such incidents may happen. While you can’t blame someone for being angry over a layoff, such behavior is very unacceptable. If your company is planning any layoffs, make sure any login info and accounts that a laid off employee may have are changed or deleted immediately, just to be safe.