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from the hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-sysadmin-scorned dept.
Angry IT admin wipes employer's databases, gets 7 years in prison:
Han Bing, a former database administrator for Lianjia, a Chinese real-estate brokerage giant, has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for logging into corporate systems and deleting the company's data.
Bing allegedly performed the act in June 2018, when he used his administrative privileges and "root" account to access the company's financial system and delete all stored data from two database servers and two application servers.
[...] Surprisingly, Bing had repeatedly informed his employer and supervisors about security gaps in the financial system, even sending emails to other administrators to raise his concerns.
However, he was largely ignored, as the leaders of his department never approved the security project he proposed to run.
This was confirmed by the testimony of the director of ethics at Lianjia, who told the court that Han Bing felt that his organizational proposals weren't valued and often entered arguments with his supervisors.
In a similar case from September 2021, a former New York-based credit union employee avenged her supervisors for firing her by deleting over 21.3GB of documents in a 40-minute attack.
Anyone have stories of any interesting employee departures that they have exprienced?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday May 18 2022, @08:46PM (6 children)
I like to think and believe that in any dispute with or departure from my employer that I would act professionally regardless of any personal hurt feelings.
I think some people today do not seem to recognize what they own and what the company owns. In some cases people don't seem to properly recognize other people's things -- that there is a bright line between what is mine and what is thine.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Booga1 on Wednesday May 18 2022, @10:09PM (1 child)
People get overly defensive about things they are responsible for. Look at the whole saga of Terry Childs. [wikipedia.org]
My take on it is this: If you have done everything you can to improve a situation but the company doesn't want to actually solve the problem, it's on them. Let it go. Let the job go if you have to, but don't be the problem.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2022, @09:35AM
My recommendation is (if you haven't already) start gathering as much documentation and evidence that proves it's on them and not on you.
Keep backups of those.
Fact is in most cases even though it's a problem, if they don't get very unlucky, nothing happens for decades.
For example > 90% of workplaces could theoretically have their servers physically stolen from their server rooms/datacenters but in practice that's extremely unlikely. So do you take extra effort to encrypt all the drives of the servers to prevent access to the data? If you do this it means if the servers need to be booted up someone needs to enter the passphrases, otherwise they won't boot up... So is it really worth it for most companies? I'd actually recommend against doing such stuff since it'd actually cause more problems for the company.
As for this particular case, "oh wow the admin can delete the data and the backups", looks like the biggest mistake the company made was hiring that idiot. He should have solved the company's security problem by resigning and leaving the industry.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 18 2022, @11:21PM (2 children)
The degree to which I act "professionally" (as in, the ways my bosses want me to act) depends a lot on the degree to which the bosses are acting illegally or unethically.
For instance, I quit a job without notice once, because the owners had made it pretty clear they were not going to be able to pay us, without notice.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday May 19 2022, @02:11PM (1 child)
In my view, that is professional. If you are told without notice that they can't pay you, there is nothing unprofessional about quitting without notice. The reason you are working is to get paid. Not out of the kindness of your heart.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2022, @11:05PM
^
Lots of old school mentalities are finally getting the booy. Reminds me of the ohrase "the customer is always right" and recently learned that it is only part of the quote. The full quote was along the lines of "in regards to fashion choices the customer is always right." It was never meant to make customers feel like entitled royalty that can treat employees like shit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 19 2022, @12:10AM
It's more a vague smudge... that you can adjust with a crowbar.