Disgruntles Employee Takes Out Company's E-Mail

[Kor37 9]

Disgruntled Employee Takes Out Company's E-Mail

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Nov 5th 2008 at 2:49PM

 

Listen closely, we don't want to have to repeat this again: Revenge-hacking your employer's servers is not a good idea. Whether it's a crappy desk location or an unpleasant termination, hacking is never an appropriate method of recourse.

 

Steven Barnes has been arrested and sentenced to one year in prison after pleading guilty to hacking an Exchange Server run by his former employer, Akimbo Systems. Barnes claims that he hacked into the system in retaliation for being fired in 2003 at the hands of a group of baseball-bat-wielding thugs. He testified that several Akimbo reps showed up on his door step and confiscated both his work and personal PCs.

 

Months later, Barnes discovered that some login information he had for the company was still valid and that the company had no security features in place to prevent him from taking over the company's e-mail server. Rather than leave well enough alone, the disgruntled employee turned the computer into an open relay server capable of sending large amounts of spam, deleted the companies Exchange database, and damaged critical operating system components so that the machine would crash when rebooted.

 

Akimbo said that it was unable to send, receive, or access e-mails and was blacklisted by several spam blocking services. Barnes, in addition to spending a year in prison, will have to pay $54,000 in restitution and will serve three years on probation.

 

Sheesh!...Drug dealers get lighter sentences than this!...

[He Who Shall Not Be Named 2]

True, but drug dealers only sell to those willing to buy. This guy basically shut down a company. He got off light.

 

The guy is also an idiot. As an IT person he should know that his User ID and password would be traced back to him.

[Ian Wood 1]

I agree, but I guess clear senses aren't in tact in the heat of the moment haha..