Slashdot Mirror
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."
What's to stop you from backing up their sensitive data and creating your back doors before you hand in your letter of resignation? If you treat your employees well, and create an atmosphere of mutual respect, when the time does come to part ways, the last month or two of employment can be constructively used to tie up loose ends and easing the transition to the next guy. If you, as an employer, have a policy of escorting someone from their workstation the moment they hand in their resignation, you're basically paying someone to twiddle their thumbs while your remaining employees scramble to cover for the guy who now is suddenly gone with no warning, while they must be thinking whether it's really worth it, just to get the same treatment when they are leaving. The "Perp walk" is just as petty a show of revenge as the guy in TFA and as damaging to the future your remaining employees to do their job. The only difference is that it is unfortunately not illegal.
Yes... it's the "how can you get away with it?" question that boggles the mind. If you can't think at least that far ahead, then you should refrain from doing more than "wish damage." (You know, I wish something bad would happen to them because I hate them kinda thing?)
If it were me, I would do something more subtle... something based on a cron job perhaps ... something that runs, clears out logs and other things, mounts VMDKs, deletes random files, exchanges the file names of various random pairs of documents and things like that. It would be weirdness that people would dismiss at first as human error which give the trail time to grow colder and bad backup data to get worse and then at some point just go all-out, destroying itself and the systems -- preferably killing the hardware in some way. Even then the chances of getting caught are pretty good as it would be a careful balance of luck and planning to create this gradual corruption of data that wouldn't go noticed until it was too late... perhaps only corrupt files older than a certain date which are not as likely to be accessed for a long while.I suppose that would be enough to allow the corruption of backups and such along the way...
Anyway, the first thing should always be to plan not to get caught or even suspected.