Twin brothers wipe 96 gov't databases minutes after being fired

The brothers’ employer appears to have learned about their criminal past at some point in February. On February 18, 2025, the brothers—who lived together in Virginia—were both called into a Microsoft Teams meeting and summarily fired. The call took place at the end of the day, wrapping up at 4:50 pm. Five minutes later, Sohaib was already trying to access his (now former) employer’s network—but found that his VPN access and Windows account were terminated. Muneeb’s account had been overlooked, however, and he immediately embarked on a campaign of destruction. At 4:56 pm, Muneeb accessed a US government database that his company maintained. He “issued commands to prevent other users from connecting or making changes to the database, and then issued a command to delete the database,” the government said. At 4:58 pm, he wiped out a Department of Homeland Security database using the command “DROP DATABASE dhsproddb.” At 4:59 pm, he asked an AI tool, “How do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases?” He later asked, “How do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012?” In the space of a single hour, Muneeb deleted around 96 databases with US government information. He downloaded 1,805 files belonging to the EEOC and stashed them on a USB drive, then grabbed federal tax information for at least 450 people. While this was going on, the brothers held a running conversation. (The government is not clear about whether this took place over text, instant message, or in person.) “I see you cleaning out their database backups,” Sohaib said as he watched Muneeb’s work. As the database casualty list grew, Sohaib said, “Alright—if you have good plausible deniability.” Muneeb didn’t appear to consider his actions a big deal. “Eh, they can recover from yesterday,” he said, referring to daily database backups. Muneeb noted that an employee they knew would “have some work to do” when the destruction was revealed. “Delete their filesystem as well?” he said. Sohaib then wondered if they had been too hasty. Perhaps, he said, “You shoulda had a kill script. Like, blackmailing them for some money would have been—” “No, you do not do that, that’s proof of guilt, man,” Muneeb said. “No, but the thing was, you always have your opinion,” Sohaib complained, and the two then bickered about whether they might try to blackmail their company’s customers instead. As the data destruction went on, Sohaib said, “They’re gonna probably raid this place.” After wiping out the databases and event logs, the brothers reinstalled the operating systems on their corporate laptops with the help of an unnamed co-conspirator. The cases would seem to be basically over, except that Muneeb has begun filing handwritten petitions from jail, arguing that his lawyer has been ineffective. More recently, the filings have taken aim at his signed guilty plea.