J
john
Guest
In 1999 I was working as a server administrator and an IT security expert for a small Irish IT company. A disgruntled ex-employee used his knowledge of the company and its clients to give the clients viruses, our company's individual computers viruses, and destroy data. He did all of this through a server of which I was in charge. Understand that he could not have done this without his knowledge of our company and clients, and his status as a manager within the company. Most employees when they leave a firm, take some intimate knowledge of the company with them and the company has to trust them to some degree not to misuse this knowledge.
This man was prosecuted by the Irish police but only because a) it was one of the first significant cyber crimes in Ireland's history (small country), b) the police wanted the publicity it would generate, and indeed, it was in all the papers and on the news, c) I was able to track down the exact computer in Dublin where the guy did all of this, and the police managed to get a security camera photo of the guy entering and leaving the building. It was pretty cut and dried.
The differences in this case are that a) this happens all the time to small organisations and web sites so it's nothing new or interesting to the authorities, b) I can't give an exact location or even a vague identity of the individual who perpetrated this crime, c) no one is really going to care that a newt and salamander web site was offline a few days, d) it's not like this is a big company or something that anyone is going to care about.
So suck it up, let's do what we can to prevent it happening in the future, and move on.
This man was prosecuted by the Irish police but only because a) it was one of the first significant cyber crimes in Ireland's history (small country), b) the police wanted the publicity it would generate, and indeed, it was in all the papers and on the news, c) I was able to track down the exact computer in Dublin where the guy did all of this, and the police managed to get a security camera photo of the guy entering and leaving the building. It was pretty cut and dried.
The differences in this case are that a) this happens all the time to small organisations and web sites so it's nothing new or interesting to the authorities, b) I can't give an exact location or even a vague identity of the individual who perpetrated this crime, c) no one is really going to care that a newt and salamander web site was offline a few days, d) it's not like this is a big company or something that anyone is going to care about.
So suck it up, let's do what we can to prevent it happening in the future, and move on.