According to the US Attorney's Office, the decision was announced on May eighth.
A federal grand jury indicted Rambler Gallo last June. charges him A single offense involved the transmission of a program, information, code and command to cause damage to a protected computer, prosecutors said. Gallo pleaded guilty to the charge.
Gallo was a full-time worker for a Massachusetts-based company that had hired Discovery Bay to operate the town's water treatment plant, which serves 15,000 residents.
Prosecutors said Gallo installed software on his PC and on the corporate's internal network that gave him distant access to the plant's computer system.
About five weeks after his resignation on Nov. 25, 2020, Gallo accessed the plant's computer system and sent a command to uninstall software that protected the water treatment system, including pressure, filtration and chemical levels, prosecutors said.
Other employees discovered the software was disabled a day after the cyberattack.
Gallo's actions “were well thought out to be as disruptive as possible” and posed “a potential threat to the health and safety of the community's water supply,” prosecutors said.
In addition to the house sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. ordered Gallo to serve three years of probation, forfeit his computer and pay $44,250 in restitution.
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