According to the complaint, the company contacted law enforcement personnel the day of Savtyrev's first alleged threat. That evening, at the direction of investigators, a company employee recorded a phone call in which Savtyrev allegedly repeated his demands. During the call, he also allegedly said he would get his "comrades from Belarus" to help him hack into the company's servers.

Savtyrev allegedly sent a second e-mail to the company on Friday, Nov. 7, and in a taped phone conversation that evening agreed to show company officials how he would exploit the systems in return for meeting his demands, the complaint said.

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

Liebermann noted 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 plan in place to quickly report any threats or breaches to law enforcement.

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