A Hungarian man was sentenced last week to 30 months in prison for hacking into Marriott International’s computers and trying to blackmail the Bethesda hotel giant into giving him a job — as a computer specialist.

Attila Nemeth, 26, was sentenced Feb. 3 by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore after pleading guilty to stealing proprietary information, including financial data, according to a statement from federal prosecutors.

The episode cost Marriott about $1 million, as more than 100 employees and consultants had to determine the scope of the cyber damage and fix it, according to Nemeth’s plea agreement.

Nemeth, also known as Louis McCarty, was arrested in January 2011 after flying from Hungary to Dulles International Airport in Virginia for a job interview with a man he believed was a Marriott employee, according to court records. Instead, the “employee” was Christopher M. Gojcz, a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service for whom the company had created an online Marriott identity as “Philip Bender.”

In the interview, Nemeth admitted that he had hacked Marriott’s computer systems from Hungary and stolen data. He also told Gojcz that he had emailed Marriott, threatening to publicly release the data unless the company gave him a job. He showed the agent just how he hacked the network and disclosed the data’s location on a server in Hungary.

According to Gojcz’s affidavit, Nemeth had emailed Marriott in November 2010 with a message that read, in part, and in broken English:

“I owned your whole computer network since months and got gigabytes of your confidental documents. ...

“So here is the deal, you fire your incompetent IT staff and hire me as an outside contractor to take care of your IT network security. I will have an initial 150K/year salary, hotel room in whatever hotel I choose, car, free flights and on top of it I will work whenever I want. I start as soon as possible within 2 weeks. After my new job works out for a couple of years all the docs I collected from your network going to wanish. ...

“If you don’t respond to this email within 2 days I going to CC it to thousands of Marriott employees (yep got all of their addresses). You don’t want that. If you refuse to help me out with my situation I will try to sell all your docs to your competitors first, if they not interested I just put them in public and go on with the next multi. ...

“As I see this it’s a win-win situation. You get a skilled, respectable employee. I get a good job after being unemployed since years.”

The email also had eight attachments, seven of which were confirmed by Marriott as bona fide company documents stored on a protected computer system, according to the affidavit.

In October, Nemeth pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and one count of attempted extortion.

A Marriott spokesman did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.