Fergie's Tech Blog

IT Worker Let Spammers Into Ex-Employer's Servers

Robert McMillan writes on CIO.com:

An IT manager who logged onto to his former employer's computer network five months after being fired and opened the e-mail server up to spammers has been sentenced to one year in prison.

Steven Barnes had earlier pleaded guilty to computer intrusion charges, saying in a plea agreement that he accessed servers at a San Mateo, California, Internet media company called Akimbo Systems and turned the company's mail system into an open mail server that spammers could use to send out messages. He also deleted the company's Microsoft Exchange e-mail database and files that the computer needed in order to boot up.

In a letter to the presiding judge, Barnes said that he had battled drug and alcohol addictions at the time, and was upset after Akimbo representatives showed up at his door in April 2003 -- one carrying a baseball bat -- and taken both his work and personal computers.

He logged onto company servers on Sept. 30 after trying an old password that had been valid before he was fired. "To my complete disbelief, I soon realized... they had no firewall and the passwords were not even changed," he said.

posted by Fergie @ 11/03/2008 06:49:00 PM