IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347
aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time some person does stuff like this and it hits the press, every other IT person ends up suffering when the PHBs realize what the sysadmin or the Cisco guy is capable of.
Will this mean better security? Of course not. It just means that oftentimes someone who shouldn't have access to enable secrets or root passwords gets those as a "backup".
Um good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Person commits crime, goes to jail. Fascinating reporting there.
Harsh Sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fowler's attack on the company's firewall, which had caused a "lockout", took Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) three months to resolve.
What? Seriously. What? What the hell is a lockout and why would it take anyone three months to solve a firewall issue?
did she really "hack" it? (Score:4, Insightful)
or did she use passwords she already had to get into the system? I wouldn't be surprised if this was yet more abuse of the word "hacking".
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I think this just highlights something I've said for years: If you don't trust your IT people, they shouldn't be your IT people.
It's a job requirement to be trustworthy when working in IT. Those who aren't pull crap like this.
Even if she hadn't gone to jail, if she got caught tampering with systems (either while employed there or after being terminated), she should never, ever, under any circumstances be trusted to admin a system again.
Ever.
Re:Harsh Sentence (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is that you are convicted by a jury of your peers and not a jury of your victims for a good reason; a jury and a judge have a better ability to be dispassionate.
That we involve victims in sentencing hearings is abominable, as is that we enforce arbitrary minimum sentencing regulations.
If I am guilty of a crime, what I did is what should matter, not how good or bad a person the victim was. Rather than go down Hypothetical Alley with you about the value of human life, I'd like to keep our hypothetical closer to the facts:
Would this crime be more heinous "your IT department", as you put it, were genuinely good people? Would it worth less sentencing if it took place at an equivalent organization whose IT staff was lazy and whose managers were bombastic annoying pricks? Surely not. In that case, your opinions as the victim as to what the guilty party deserves regarding sentencing are too compromised.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Um good? (Score:3, Insightful)
You missed it. There's a girl in IT. That's the news!
Its not even that she hacked in. NASA has always had a problem with girlfriends of employees getting pissed, getting in and then breaking stuff.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I think this just highlights something I've said for years: If you don't trust your IT people, they shouldn't be your IT people.
And if you decided to fire them, make sure you terminate their access to your network in a timely manner. Somehow I seriously doubt Ms. Fowler actually "hacked" their systems. It is far more likely that after four days she discovered her remote access account still works and she took full advantage of this.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:4, Insightful)
One difference is the respect that is shown and compensation provided to accountants, managers, legal advisers and so on. Meanwhile IT guys are basically treated like janitors.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't trust your IT people, they shouldn't be your IT people.
I think the managers sort of realized that, and that's why they fired her.
Maybe the true lesson to learn is this: don't let former employees keep their access. Not even for a few days.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:5, Insightful)
No one should have root passwords. The mere existence of a root password is a fundamental security hole. If everyone has a user account and certain people have sudo privileges, you have:
Combine this with a proper centralized authentication/directory services system, and you're done.
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:4, Insightful)
* - If he is the moron then why is it that you are working for him?
Re:Makes the rest of us suffer... (Score:2, Insightful)