The criminal complaint notes that he sent a third e-mail on Saturday saying he had opened several backdoors in the company's system and it would take months to find them.

Assistant , who also worked on the case, noted in an earlier interview that with a rocky economy and increased layoffs, companies need to shore up their defenses by shutting down internal and remote access immediately upon terminating a worker, monitoring system logs for any anomalies, adding extra layers of security and having a process in place for quickly reporting any threats or breaches to law enforcement agencies.

"And it's important that they report instances like this before they go from a threat to a loss of data," he added.