Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting 'Time Bomb' In Company's Database (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Allegro MicroSystems LLC is suing a former IT employee for sabotaging its database using a "time bomb" that deleted crucial financial data in the first week of the new fiscal year. According to court documents, after resigning from his job, a former sysadmin kept one of two laptops. On January 31, Patel entered the grounds of the Allegro headquarters in Worcester, Massachusetts, just enough to be in range of the factory's Wi-Fi network. Allegro says that Patel used the second business-use laptop to connect to the company's network using the credentials of another employee. While connected to the factory's network on January 31, Allegro claims Patel, who was one of the two people in charge of Oracle programming, uploaded a "time bomb" to the company's Oracle finance module. The code was designed to execute a few months later, on April 1, 2016, the first week of the new fiscal year, and was meant to "copy certain headers or pointers to data into a separate database table and then to purge those headers from the finance module, thereby rendering the data in the module worthless." The company says that "defendant Patel knew that his sabotage of the finance module on the first week of the new fiscal year had the maximum potential to cause Allegro to suffer damages because it would prevent Allegro from completing the prior year's fiscal year-end accounting reconciliation and financial reports."

Comments

Re:So many stupid questions

[Anonymous Coward]

One more stupid question:
Have you ever worked anywhere before?

They had backups right?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I am sure a big company like Allegro will have all the critical information replicated in multiple locations. I am sure they restored all the data in a few seconds and laughed at the stupid sys admin. Right? That is how the story should have ended

Re:Pretty Obvious What the Timebomb Is...

[Thelasko]

They're using Oracle.

Seriously. If they were using SAP he would have never figured out how to sabotage it.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Cajun Hell]

I want to know why the fuck he chose to attack a company he voluntarily resigned from.

To this day (wow, has it really been 50 years?), I still don't know why Number Six resigned. Perhaps the reason he was kidnapped and taken to The Village, was that the government had serious concerns about what he was going to do next. Until you know why he resigned, it's really hard to guess anything else.