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Former employee destroyed data

by on02 September 2021


Forgot to delete her remote access

In what is going to become a significant post remote working problem, a former employee whose company forgot to cancel her remote access destroyed 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the bank's share drive.

Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired.

According to court documents, the defendant worked remotely as a part-time employee for the credit union until May 19, 2021, when she was fired. Even though a credit union employee asked the bank's information technology support firm to disable Barile's remote access credentials, that access was not removed.

Two days later, Barile logged on for roughly 40 minutes and deleted over 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories during that time, totalling roughly 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the bank's share drive.

Gone were files related to customers' mortgage loan applications and the financial institution's anti-ransomware protection software.

Besides deleting documents with customer and company data, Barile also opened various confidential Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union.

For some reason she bragged about it to a mate in a text saying:  "They didn't revoke my access so I deleted p drift lol. [..] I deleted their shared network documents."

Although the New York credit union had backups of some of the data deleted by the defendant, it still had to spend more than $10,000 to restore the destroyed data following Barile's unauthorised intrusion.

Last modified on 02 September 2021
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