frustration at work
Angry IT admin deleted his company’s data – now he faces seven years in prison
Seven years in prison: A harsh sentence. (icon picture)
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Probably out of frustration, an employee of a Chinese real estate company deleted his employer’s databases. The incident cost the company dearly, and the man must now be behind bars.
In 2018 nothing worked at the Chinese real estate group Lianjia: After two databases and two servers for applications were deleted, the company was no longer able to pay salaries for a longer period of time and could no longer cope with day-to-day business. In addition, Lianjia had to shoulder a cost of US$30,000 to recover the lost data through a lengthy process.
The cause of the incident was probably a frustrated employee who caused his employer’s digital framework to collapse. A man was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for “the crime of sabotaging the computer information system.”
His behavior made him suspicious
Suspicion quickly fell on him as he didn’t want to give the password to his laptop to the colleagues investigating the case. Under the pretext that the computer contained private information, he only wanted to hand over the device to the authorities and be present at the controls.
What he didn’t know: the internal investigators were well aware that they wouldn’t find anything on the computer anyway, since deleting a server wouldn’t have left any traces. They were concerned with the employee’s reaction and willingness to cooperate. And since his reaction apparently differed greatly from that of his direct colleagues, who would also have had access to delete the data, the search for a culprit could be narrowed down.
The definitive proof was then provided by matching results based on unique identification features of his computer in the server access logs. After the computer’s IP address and MAC address were found, the investigators compared WLAN connection logs and times and looked at the company’s camera recordings for video evidence – bingo.
First ignored, then imprisoned
The frustration must have run deep, because the investigation revealed that he had not only superficially deleted his employer’s data, but had overwritten it three times, making recovery almost impossible.
In the search for a motive, they finally found what they were looking for in their superiors and older e-mails. This shows that the IT admin had been warning of possible security gaps in Lianjia’s systems for a long time and had often argued with the bosses as a result. However, the IT expert was apparently not listened to: a project he wanted to increase security was never approved, and his warnings fell on deaf ears.
source: Bleeding computer