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Man To Pay $300,000 In Damages For Hacking Employer (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A former private security officer in California must pay nearly $319,000 in damages for attacking his employer's computer systems. Yovan Garcia accessed payroll records at Security Specialists, which provides private security patrols, to inflate the number of hours he had worked. He later hacked the firm's servers to steal data and defaced its website. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald said Garcia had used the stolen data to help set up a rival business. Security Specialists first noticed issues with Mr Garcia's pay records in July 2014, about two years after he joined. In one example, they showed he had worked 12 hours per day over a two-week period and was owed 40 hours of overtime pay, when in fact he only worked eight hours per day.
I had a CS Prof that told a story about the early mainframe days at my Uni. When he was a student, they used to give free computer time as rewards for bug reports. He and friends found that the payroll system had no security. Any mainframe user could alter records. So they reported the problem. A week later nothing changed, so they reported it again. Later, still no change.
So they wrote themselves each a check for -1,000,000 USD.
They were all called in the next day to explain how the payroll made nearly three million dollars.