IT Administrator Gets Fired, Goes Rogue
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 04/01/2017 10:52 AM
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A former IT administrator, Joe Vito Venzor, 41, has pled guilty to hacking the servers and cloud accounts of his employer after they fired him.
Venzor did not go quietly. It took staff an hour to get him out of the building after his meeting with the IT director.
The company, Lucchese Boot Company in El Paso, Texas, took the precaution of revoking Venzor's access rights. However, an hour later an "elphaser" administrator account logged onto the company's network and shut down the corporate email server, followed by its application server which ran the production line.
Venzor then started deleting files on the server so a reboot would not work. He then turned his attention to the company cloud accounts, shutting them down or changing the passwords.
The company IT employees suspected who was behind the attack and checked Venzors email account and found that just before he was ejected from the building, he sent himself a file. Further indications found that the email contained network access codes and passwords for various IT subsystems.
The IT director tried to get ahead of Venzor by changing passwords on various systems not yet affected. It was only partially successful. Venzors work was so invasive that the company was forced to purchase a new server and reload the software. The company also had to bring in outside IT assistance and said it lost $100,000 in failed orders.
The FBI arrested Venzor and charged with unauthorized intrusion upon protected computers. He admitted his crime and now faces up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine plus the costs incurred by the company.
Source: The Register
Venzor did not go quietly. It took staff an hour to get him out of the building after his meeting with the IT director. The company, Lucchese Boot Company in El Paso, Texas, took the precaution of revoking Venzor's access rights. However, an hour later an "elphaser" administrator account logged onto the company's network and shut down the corporate email server, followed by its application server which ran the production line.
Venzor then started deleting files on the server so a reboot would not work. He then turned his attention to the company cloud accounts, shutting them down or changing the passwords.
The company IT employees suspected who was behind the attack and checked Venzors email account and found that just before he was ejected from the building, he sent himself a file. Further indications found that the email contained network access codes and passwords for various IT subsystems.
The IT director tried to get ahead of Venzor by changing passwords on various systems not yet affected. It was only partially successful. Venzors work was so invasive that the company was forced to purchase a new server and reload the software. The company also had to bring in outside IT assistance and said it lost $100,000 in failed orders.
The FBI arrested Venzor and charged with unauthorized intrusion upon protected computers. He admitted his crime and now faces up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine plus the costs incurred by the company.
Source: The Register
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