A former engineer is fired by his employer. He seeks revenge by causing chaos in the company network.
A former cloud engineer employed at a bank was sentenced to two years in prison after an intelligence investigation for “hacking into a network and making false statements to a government agency.” This is reported by the British magazine PCGamer.
After his employer took disciplinary action against him and fired him, he used his network access to damage the internal IT systems of his former employer.
Employee uses old company laptop to create chaos
What was the reason for the dismissal? The former employee was allegedly watching pornographic material on his work device. At the same time, the employee claimed, when he was caught, that he had no knowledge of any of this. The next day, he was fired by his employer. However, the dismissed employee did not let this slide.
What happened next? After his dismissal, the former employee took the company laptop home because it still contained valid login credentials. He then logged into the IT system of his ex-company and caused chaos there:
- He deleted code.
- He uploaded a script to delete other logs.
- Furthermore, he managed to exclude other users from the services.
- Additionally, he emailed himself protected code he had been working on.
- He impersonated another senior engineer and distributed slander against other individuals.
When his company asked him to return the laptop after the incident, he claimed that the device had been stolen. Later, after his arrest, he told this story to the intelligence service as well.
However, after pleading guilty in court, he admitted that this was a false statement, which he knew was false at that time.
Without the laptop or without access, this probably would have never happened. To this day, it is unclear why the company did not simply revoke the ex-employee’s access to put a stop to the revenge campaign.
How did the case turn out? The presiding judge sentenced the culprit to a 2-year prison term with three years of supervision after release and ordered restitution of $529,266.37. The damage caused was assessed by the judge at $220,621.22, which is approximately 200,000 euros.
By the way, another employee fared not much better. He also harmed his company and was eventually caught:
