One Former Employee Can Bring Down a Company

Logging in from a Smyrna, Georgia, McDonald's restaurant, a former U.S. pharmaceutical company employee was able to wipe out most of the company's computer infrastructure earlier this year. The ex-worker, age 37, formerly an IT staffer at the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese drug-maker Shionogi, pleaded guilty August 16 to computer intrusion charges in connection with the February 3 attack. He wiped out 15 VMware host systems running e-mail, order tracking, financial, and other services for the Florham Park, New Jersey firm. The February 3 attack effectively froze Shionogi operations for a number of days, leaving company employees unable to ship product, to cut checks, or even to communicate via e-mail, the U.S. Department of Justice said in court filings. Total cost to Shionogi: $800,000. The man resigned from the company in July 2010 after getting into a dispute with management, but was kept on as a consultant for 2 more months. Then, in September 2010, the drugmaker laid off the man and other employees, but it not revoke all passwords to the network. Using a Shionogi account, the man was able to log into the network from a public McDonalds Internet connection, and fire up a vSphere VMware management console he had secretly installed on the network a few weeks earlier. Using vSphere, he deleted 88 company servers from the VMware host systems, one by one. He was charged in July. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison when he is sentenced November 10.