Sacked IT director banged up for revenge hack attack

An IT director who took revenge on his former employer following his dismissal by hacking its website and deleting files has been jailed for 27 months. Darnell H Albert-El, 53, of Richmond, Virginia, who admitted the cyber-assault against systems at Transmarx, was also ordered to pay $6,700 in restitution to his former …

[Terry Kiely]

AMATEUR!

fancy using his own account!

a true BOFH would have framed up another co-worker

then like Kaiser Sochai, 'puff' he was gone

[lglethal]

I suspect...

I suspect you meant Keyser Söze... Its a Hungarian name you know, nothing to do with King Sochai...

Sorry just being pedantic...

[Elmer Phud]

Pedantic?

Well use the correct icon then!

FFS!!!!

(It's the Jimmy Edwards one)

[Winkypop]

Hardly hacking..

...when some functionary forgets to cancel his log-in account.

Still, a very silly thing to do by the perp'

[Anonymous John]

Hack attack?

It's hardly hacking if his access wasn't removed when he was sacked. Some of the blame attaches to the employer.

[James O'Shea]

stupid, to the fourth power

Stupid, on the part of the idiot who made the attack, to use his own account to make the attack.

Stupid, on the part of the idiots in charge at the company, for not having deleted that account before he was out the door.

Stupid, again on the part of the idiot in question as given the time frame of the attack he'd be on the list of suspects.

Stupid, one one time, on the part of the idiot in question as he committed a Federal felony and yet managed to do very little damage. If you're gonna commit Federal felonies, aim high.

Now, if at some time during his stay at the company he had created an admin account in a different name and didn't tell anyone about it, and there were sufficient employees that one more account wouldn't cause comment, now _that_ would have been a hack... and, assuming that he used that account from a machine which could not be traced to him, both not stupid and hard to track. Although he'd still be on the list of suspects 'cause he only waited a month. Wait a year, then corrupt their backups and _then_ delete _all_ the files. Or don't do it at all.

Idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

When will people learn?

If you fire a BoFH, the very least you should do is delete their account (or change the password as they'll probably be using 'Administrator'/'root').

An even better approach would be to force a password change on everyone with a login as soon as he's out the door - I don't know of any BoFHs that don't know at least some of the passwords of their lusers.

But... if you're going to do it, at least make it worthwhile. Give the website tourettes or something (subtle, but with big enough impact for visitors) and corrupt any backups they may have (systematically - by hacking the backup routine, if they swap out tapes/whatever).

Seriously, if you're gonna get in trouble at least make it worthwhile.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why it's best not to drink away your troubles.

You end up doing something really stupid and landing yourself in shit.

I know I make assumptions about his sobriety but it does seem likely this was fire water fueled..

[Yag]

Well... Stupid as he was...

... No surprise he was fired.

Conveniently turning off most antivirus and planting a nice set of virii and troyan on every servers would have been far less conspicuous, and far more efficient!

I know, I'm reading too much BOfH :)

[Martin 49]

Old School

Doesn't anyone use "software time-bombs" any more?

[Anonymous Coward]

Director, not Admin

Note that this was an IT Director and not a Sysadmin. They made a mistake sacking him, as he clearly knows much more about IT than most IT Directors.