Fired Techie Created Virtual Chaos At Pharma Co.

itwbennett writes "Using a secret vSphere console, Jason Cornish, formerly an IT staffer at the U.S. subsidiary of drug-maker Shionogi, wiped out most of the company's computer infrastructure earlier this year. Cornish, 37, pleaded guilty Tuesday to computer intrusion charges in connection with the attack."

Comments

How he got caught.

[will_die]

For those wondering how he got caught, he accessed the servers from his home also for the McDonalds just before he accessed them he purchased some food using this credit card.

I'm impressed he could do that much damage...

[Mysticalfruit]

I usually can only destroy 10 or so vm's before my vsphere client runs out of memory / handles or just segfaults for the fun of it. Needless to say, my displeasure with that vpshere client has caused me to become somewhat of a vsphere command line ninja.

Firstly, it appears this guy was treated poorly and not only is he a nitwit, it would appear that most of his coworkers/management were as well.

Secondly, it's acts of sabotage like this that make it hard for the rest of us to do our jobs.

Thirdly, on a not so serious note... wi-fi from McDonalds? vSphere console? How did he think he was NOT going to get caught? Did he even try to wipe the logs off the vsphere server? Had this guy two brain cells in his head, he could have obliterated their infrastructure and not left a trace of evidence.

Re:I hope they throw the book at him

[ScentCone]

So what was his dispute with the management that made him do this?

It doesn't matter what his dispute was. There are no circumstances in which doing the equivalent of burning down your former place of employment is a legitmate move in a dispute.

Re:Who will pay the damages? Compensation?

[neokushan]

And in case you didn't figure it out, "^" represents the CTRL key.

And oddly enough, it's not just VI - the windows command prompt works exactly the same way, open one now and hit CTRL+V (probably expecting to paste something) only to get ^V on your screen instead. But it's ok, hit CTRL+H and it'll backspace for you.

I believe its less to do with VI and it's CRAZINESS and more to do with the legacy of some keyboards not actually having a backspace key. Shock horror, I know.

(Cue the "...back in my day, we had to use TWO keys to backspace!" comments...).

Re:Who will pay the damages? Compensation?

[maxwell demon]

The reason why caps lock is above shift is that it's the position where it was on mechanical typewriters. And the reason it was there on mechanical typewriters is that it physically fixed the shift key, and therefore had to be on the metal bar connecting the shift key to the carriage.