Computer fraud: charge IBM

Saw this story about an outsourced techie who took some minor revenge.

After Aventis outsourced its computer security operations to IBM in late 2000, Millot found himself out of a job.

But he kept an administrator-level SecureID card with him and used it to enter the network nine times. During one of those intrusions, Millot deleted the account for his former colleague Jeff Jernigan, Aventis’ manager of technical services.

IBM employees eventually tracked down what happened and restored Jernigan’s access. IBM billed Aventis for its investigators’ time at $50 an hour, for a total cost of $20,350.

The poor guy got 3 months in prison, a $5000 fine, and $20,000 in restitution that he had to repay his old employer … all for a really, really stupid (and yes, illegal) act. He shouldn’t have done it, obviously.

The real story here though, is that the higher up the food chain you go, the more crime pays. And the less you pay for committing it.

I mean, he deletes one user account and IBM spends 407 hours finding out what happened and creating a new account? Bill the the client $20 K to do that has got to be a more criminal act that deleting the user account in the first place.

Scott McNealy once had a comment about IBM Global Services being a giant Hoover sucking up all their clients’ money. Case in point, I guess.

Unbelievable.