Air Canada Sues Over Misuse Of Employee Password

Anonymous Coward writes "What do you do when you let an employee go? You kill their password and ID, right? Air Canada didn't, and they're now in court because the employee went to a competitor, wrote some cool automated scripts using the ID/password, and grabbed some company data." Interesting story, because Air Canada authorized the employee to access this website and book tickets for himself as part of his severance, but they apparently provide a little more data on that site than what is available to the public.

Comments

Calling a spade a "spade" are we?

[LostCluster]

Some of Canada's largest pension funds as well as Toronto conglomerate Onex Corp. and several U.S. vulture funds have been mentioned as possible replacement investors in the airline.

Was that a typo... or is The Globe and Mail public on it's low opinion of venture capital operations?

Re:Calling a spade a "spade" are we?

[Zocalo]

Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.

Re:Calling a spade a "spade" are we?

[LostCluster]

Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.

Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?

Re:Calling a spade a "spade" are we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?

I think he misspelled "assholes".

Re:Calling a spade a "spade" are we?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

there's gonna be assets left in SCO?

I would guess not much more than office equipment, furniture and an unread copy of "Litigation for Dummies".

Excellent newspaper

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Some of Canada's largest pension funds as well as Toronto conglomerate Onex Corp. and several U.S. vulture funds have been mentioned as possible replacement investors in the airline.

Finally a newspaper that calls a cat a cat!

It's all about size.

[NickeB]

Of course you don't remove old IDs/PWDs, the larger the user database is, the cooler it looks.
Right?

Re:Thou shalt check thine logs...

[Willeh]

Or they just assumed he was a compulsive, obsessive control freak checking up on his flight every 5 seconds, and that was the reason they fired him in the first place.

Re:Thou shalt check thine logs...

[dotgain]

Maybe he wanted FP...?

Terrible Journalism

[Tedium Unleased]

How do we know they were 'cool' scripts. If he was such a great scripter, why was he let go.. or is simple web crawler enough to pass for 'cool' these days. Perhaps they were among some of the most inefficient scripts of all time, rivaling those found in the Hall of Terrible Programming.

Re:The Funny Part

[Anonymous Coward]

... corporation that can depend on the govt bailing them out when they run out of money

What's wrong with that? That's how they do it in the USA.

Uhhh..web traffic reports?

[lordkimbot]

'The airline alleges Lafond's identification number was used 243,630 times between May 15, 2003, and March 19, 2004, to access the website'

Let's see who's visiting our website last month...OMG!

How could a commercial website be so clueless?