Get Fired. Delete Colleague's Account. Go To Jail. 425
SierraPete writes "CNet reports that Thomas Millot, a former systems analyst for a major pharmaceutical company, has lost his appeal on a computer intrusion charge. Mr. Millot was convicted of unlawfully entering the system that he used to work on and deleting a colleague's account after his job was outsourced. Mr. Millot's attorneys argued that his actions did not amount to $5K in damage--the threshold for the crime he was convicted of. The court disagreed, saying that IBM had done over $20K in work to undo his handiwork." Update: 01/14 19:55 GMT by J : Typo corrected; turns out the word "not" is important...
IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Go to jail already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
Two lessons in there (Score:5, Insightful)
What I get out of it: don't outsource IT to a firm that doesn't lock out former employees
Or here is a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
But I guess it makes more sense to let child molesters on the street and keep a dangerous hacker behind bars! What has this country come to.
What difference does that make? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
-2. Find out who was responsible.
1. Find exactly when and what happened.
0. Find out exactly how much damage was done.
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
So would I, after my minor additions. (Yeah, they were implied, but you have to spell this kind of thing out for some people.)
Re:Go to jail already. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of people here who seem to feel that because they can figure out how to do something, they have the right to do it. "I can, therefore I should be allowed to," would sum it up. It's a group that feels that if you lose your job, you are justified in taking revenge, legal or illegal. While losing a job is a rough experience, it's part of life. Businesses change and let people go. If you're not a big enough person to accept it and move on, then maybe you weren't responsible enough to accept the job in the first palce.
Yes, he should go to jail, but those that feel that they are, somehow because of their superior technical skills, some part of a "hacking elite" that should be able to break any laws they consider wrong (read: laws that are in their way, since, in their minds they are always right) and should be able to do so without consequence.
It's a shame because such people really make it harder for the rest of us, both in discussions here and in life in general.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
The real effect of his record will be that it effectively bars him from working in I.T. Which might not be an entirely bad thing -- the guy DOES seem to have a pretty flexible moral compass, doesn't he?
My question is, why is this in "your rights online"?
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:1, Insightful)
Excellent, let's see MORE of this (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article, there were multiple breakins, on multiple days, over a period of years.
The last likely removed files between backups, resulting in time lost for the employee. It doesn't speak of what was done during previous raids by this crook, but it is quite possible other costs were attributed to previous breakins.
Crimes like this should be punished, and harshly. This crook should receive a couple of years, for something like this. Perhaps more.
Why so harsh, you ask? It's simple. We need to start attributing _real_ penalties to crime on the internet. Sony, for example, should have seen criminal charges levied against the employees, management and all that had anything to do with that back door. Fines should have been in the billions. Yes, billions, as they should have received several thousands in fines per count. Employees must be treated harsely as well, after all, they can not legally claim they are just "following orders".
If you know your employer is doing something illegal, you are BREAKING THE LAW if you do not report such an act! If you work with the employer, helping to break the law, guess what! It's jail time for you!
We need (well, actually.. needed to, past tense) lock down crime on the internet a long time ago. We really have two choices here. We pay for police presence on the internet, judges that understand the crimes being committed.. or we leave the internet open and lawless.. and see horrid restrictions come down as a result.
People won't put up with cracking all over the place. The public will demand security. The public is indeed, starting to. It can come from laws and police enforcement of those laws.. or draconian laws that restrict rights and freedom on the net (DRM).
Which do you choose? DRM all over the place, locked down bioses and operating systems, logging so intense that ISPs keep a year of detailed backlogs, or realistic laws and paid for strong police presence on the net?
Police all over the world are crying out that they are overburdened with crimes on the net. They are claiming that they don't have the ability to catch crooks, because they need new laws. It's happening right here, in Canada. It's happening, because police _don't_ have the manpower to handle crime on the net, by tracking down crime in the standard fashion. The answer, to them, is increased logging and wiretaps/net taps without warrents. I say, that democracy costs.
To that end, we need to train judges and police to specifically handle computer crime. We need to enact treaties with out countries, and make sure that extradition is a possiblilty. We need to make sure that the police do not have unlimited ability to spy, but that there are judges in place that can issue warrants when the cause is evident. Fund the police, or allow DRM. Again, that is the choice we have.
Anyhow, back to this particular case. A case like this, should be treated as if a physical breakin occurred, sentence wise. This guy KNEW he was breaking the law. He KNEW he was being an asshole. Being employed by someone does not entitle you to smash things in a temper tantrum, years after you've been fired or outsourced.
Bleh.
Re:Or here is a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
So your argument is that white collar criminals aren't really criminals? I don't buy it.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's some basic information:
- Those 5 or 50 man days were spent cleaning up on the incident, and are not recoverable. (As opposed to endless meetings that "optimize" the performance of the company.) While it may not seem like a lot, it just takes one lost man day on a critical path to slow down an entire project.
- Restoring from backup is not typically a drag-and-drop operation. In general, most large companies use backup tapes to store a large amount of data, and those are not typically random access.
- When there is a person with Administrator privilages that made the changes, you need to assume Rootkit. This takes a lot of time to steralize the computer and examine what went wrong. In addition, you can't always assume that the logs are legitimate.
- You still need to to check whether a script kiddie simply cracked the password to an account, or if it was a disgruntled employee that used an idle account.
What appears to be a simple 5 man hours of work can easily balloon into 50, especially when you have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminial conviction.
No, he didn't screw up. A screw-up requires incompetance, and does not apply to malice of any form (unless the incompetance existed during the malicious act.)
Re:What difference does that make? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably not ineptitude, but security audit (Score:3, Insightful)
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the cost of the investigation can't be counted. If you steal a $1 candybar from walmart, they're not allowed to add in the costs of the police investigation/arrest to the crime itself. Or else there'd never be any petty crime.
Re:Go to jail already. (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, the court of LAW also judged him to be guilty of a crime, so therefore he faces the punishment for committing a crime. From TFA: But he kept an administrator-level SecureID card with him and used it to enter the network nine times.
NINE times. That's not a quick leaving-day "fuck-you" to the Man, that's premeditated and deliberate.
However, let's look at this in simple terms without specifics. Your account and account are tools you need to do your job if you work in IT, correct? If the story said "Fired mechanic broke into the shop and cut up $10,000 worth of his replacements' tools and equipment with an acetylene torch" you wouldn't be saying "boo" about it, even though this would probably be quicker to recover from (borrow other workers' tools in the shop until insurance replaces them a few days later) than a forensic audit on a system (shut it down and lock everyone out until you figure out how someone got in and what they did).
Here's the take-away from this: He was fired. He broke things belonging to the company after he was fired. That is a crime. He goes to jail for doing it. End of story.
Compare to physical crime maybe? (Score:2, Insightful)
What if he'd unlocked the front door with a copied key, broken off his coleague's key in the lock, maybe shredded a few random documents and destroyed the lock on a filing cabinet?
I don't think this sort of punishment would be appropriate, so why is it just because it's electronic? Even if they hired $expensive_security_company to repair the lock and the filing cabinet, and then claimed that was the cost of damage...it would be considered ridiculous.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:2, Insightful)
* an account manager to handle the issue with the customer
* a senior analyst to evaluate the situation and make an action plan
* a systems analyst to make recommandations to prevent this kind of issue in the future (new ACLs, firewall rules, etc)
* a couple of technicians to carry out the job (log scanning, password reset, etc)
* a security specialist to proceed to an ethical hack and validate the new measures
* a security analyst to review the company's security policy
Would they bill only 50$/h for those people, still the invoice could get high very quickly. They would not even have to get nasty. But then 50$/h an hour is a very low rate for consultants.
Welcome to the world of big business.
Re:Or here is a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
What, in your opinion, does society gain from imprisoning this person? Does it deter him from future crimes more than the $25k fine? I would imagine that, since he is unlikely to work in IT ever again, this fine will have a much greater effect on his future life. Does it make society safer? Would anyone have been placed in any danger (either physical or financial) by this person having been free for the three months of the sentence? Does the sentence deter others from committing the same crime? I would imagine that the prospect of never working again in their chosen field and having to spend a while with a good chunk of their disposable income going to pay a fine is a much greater deterrent for most people.
It's a crime. That doesn't mean "jail time". (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen lots of similar comments about how what he did was wrong and that he should therefore go to jail.
I don't think anyone claims what he did was not wrong, but jail time isn't the only answer our society has to crime. The question here is not whether what he did was wrong. The question is whether he should go to jail for it.
I say no. We already send too many people to jail. Generally, jail time is bad. It costs our society money, and it makes the situation worse for those spending the time in jail, and it makes our society worse because these people will most likely come out of the jail a worse person than when they went in.
This person here didn't harm anyone. He harmed a company. And he didn't do anything which can't be undone by recovering the data from a backup. Really, what he did was wrong, but it is hardly something worth putting him in jail for.
Re:Go to jail already. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, see, you don't know that. That's an assumption. You assume he's guilty of everyting you accuse him of because he probably is guilty of some of it. You can only punish him for what you can prove he did, and you can never prove his intention even if he announces what his intentions were. Similarly there are a lot of other things you cannot prove. Thousands of them.
A court of law makes educated guesses. They are not sure about anything. Therefore nothing about this case is "obvious". That someone thinks it is obvious indicates a prejudice inconsiderate of the possibility of undue suffering of their fellow man.
Had the grandparent said "He should probably be thrown in jail", then I would not have argued. However, saying that is inconsequential and qould likely get modded 'Redunadnt'. Saying that he should obviously be thrown in jail sounds something akin to the exaggerated mode of speak some people resort to in casual conversations. Since people have an annoying tendency to go "yeah" to anything anyone in their surrounding says, there's the potential that a lot of people arbitrarily decide that 'this should be done' and form a mob. A contigency, of course, but it has happened before. Humans are not rational beings, but pack animals. By merely saying that no, it isn't obvious, I automatically provoke a retort by disagreeing. I can skip this by saying it's because "A thousand factors". Now someone either uses his wit and thinks for himself or is provoked to attack that statement. A statement which I have already enforced in my last reply in this thread.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
Based on that reasoning why not 500 man days? 5,000?
"Damages" should be calculated based on actual damages. If not, there's really no limit to how much damage they can claim.
It's not that I necessarily believe that the number 50 is unreasonable, it's that the argument you're using to support it certainly is.
Imagine if this was applied to someone who stole a $1 candy bar: Yes, it only took $1 to replace the candy bar, but we had to spend $10,000 to inventory the whole store.
There are 2 idiots in this story (Score:5, Insightful)
2. The idiot who didn't disable the account of a security chief who's just been fired.
Remind me never to do business with a company who are that lax with security.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:2, Insightful)
It is fair that they seek to recover the money/man-hours which were expended to undo the actual damage inflicted by the perpetrator. They actually had to expend those resources to get their production environment back the way it was before the intrusion. But why include the cost to "make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious"? Yes, the intruder is ultimately responsible for the damage. But is he/she also punishable for the network's sloppy security?
I see more and more cases like this where the actual damage inflicted is very small and the actual recovery is not expensive. However, the sanitizing of the network takes up the bulk of the time.(E.g. one server compromised, easily spotted in what might be the preliminary stages of a deeper attack. But the incident response team spends absolutely ages tweaking filters and going through logs trying to see if anything else was compromised or if the intruder has gained a foothold in the network.)
Any thoughts on this?
Seems simple enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh Please... (Score:3, Insightful)
If they've been fired, why the hell would you want them training anyone anyway?
Re:What difference does that make? (Score:3, Insightful)
did I mention delete the account?
Sorry about the excessive use of caps but the solution seems so very painfully obvious. Deleting the person's account when they leave protects both parties. The employee will not be able to do what that guy did and loging when they get home and do lots of damage, not that a sysadmin shouldn't make backups, and it prevents someone from changing the pword of the person who just left and connecting from an open access point, possibly outside/near some coffee shop with 'free wi-fi' where the are no cameras, using a randomly generated mac addr and logging in as the person who just left and doing lots of damage. Then all 'evidence' points to the person who just left, assuming the person remebers to delete all records of the pwrod change. Or someone puts out their no longer needed logins&pwords and SecurID card out in the trash together and is found by someone and sold to someone else who des the damage. Yes, this guy confessed, but it could just as easily been someone else.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
No system is 100% secure. Even if you do assume their security is state-of-the-art, there's still a margin of vulnerability. In this case, a security professional who was responsible for those systems abused his knowledge and former access to gain entry. Once he's in, there's no telling how many hacks, exploits, and sneaky tricks (not to mention previously-installed backdoors) he knows and can use to his advantage.
No matter what their level of security and how much money they spent hardening everything in the past, they simply cannot be positive he hasn't found a way to sneak around their logs, sniffers, and monitors and install a rootkit. 50 man-days to recover doesn't sound so bad when you consider that one successful intrusion (however difficult it was to achieve) can result in an invisible-yet-gaping orifice that leaves all that hard-earned security worthless to future penetration.
I agree that what Mr. Millot did is pretty stupid and stinks of 'amateur,' but IBM is operating in paranoia mode (and rightly so!). What if this guy is a pansy who knows just enough to get himself caught, but he was hired by a shady individual to plant a stealthy something and deleted the account as an afterthought? How does IBM know that their system isn't still compromised by something like that? Because they spent 50 man-days wiping and re-imaging systems or poring over md5 signatures or whatever it is they do in a situation like this.
Actually, they still can't be 100% positive, but at least they were (to paraphrase the parent) duly diligent.
How many people did IBM send? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go to jail already. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, that's an incompetent company not disabling a SecureID card when they dismiss an employee. I know the location and status of every SecureID card I'm responsible for. If we terminate someone, the card is inactive before he even knows he's fired.
Re:IBM was grossly incompetent (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the certifications you put after your name, you should know the first rule of a security investigation: never ever assume you know what happened at the outset. One of the first things IBM would've had to do is check everything to make sure what the logs were showing them was reliable and not something the cracker had planted to divert an investigation away from his real activities.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go to jail already. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
undo? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The court disagreed, saying that IBM had done over $20K in work to undo his handiwork."
TFA says something different. "BM billed Aventis for its investigators' time at $50 an hour, for a total cost of $20,350." - which is not the same as 'undoing' whatever he did.
I would also like to see another person sharing the guilty in this case -- the security/system administrators responsible for ensuring that every employee who leaves has his account access (via SecurID, or any other method) removed. For employees who get fired, this should be done *before* they're informed about the decision.
If they don't do their job properly, they're effectively handling out daggers to ex-employees to come and stab the company anytime.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not his account he was using to access it, but rather an auxilary "Admin-level" card he stole. He was in charge of admin-ing the SecureID tokens, and had issued "spare" or "loaner" tokens. Bad security policy yes, but perhaps they outsourced his job because he made stupid policy decisions. Perhasp they should have done a full audit when he was let go, but in large companies this can be extremely difficult and disruptive, and still doesn't cover all the potential backdoors/traps/trojans a malicious admin could lay. The reality is you trust professionals to do whast right, they were already ahead of the game using token based authentication, its impossible for him to have a co-workers password
Blaming the victim is always bad policy, and you should feel no remorse for a criminal who has put IT professionals in a bad light. This wasn't one stupid momment, it was a series of really dumb decisions.
1. Steal SecureID token from company you no longer work for
2. Access (9 times at least!) former company's private network
3. Vandalize former comapny by deleting data
Personally, I'd feel fine if the company added lost productivity to the toll, not just for the manager, but for any projects that were delayed as a result of his criminal behavior, etc. This idiot got off light, don't be an idiot yourself and sympathize with him.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I can restore someone's access to a system that I sysadmin in about 15 minutes. Add an hour or two to restore backups of their home directory and any other data that may have been deleted with the account. Add in a 4 hour murphy's law buffer, and a day of tracing your steps through the system to make sure you didn't do anything else, and the company is out less than 1,000 dollars. Assume a generous 1000 dollars for the theoretical cost of "downtime" of the employee (which should have been all of "Hey, I can't log in. Hey Frank, I can't log in... Oh, it's working again, thanks!"). You're still at 2,000 dollars. Unless they have a nasty, unadministerable system, this should be the cost of the intrusion for damage purposes.
Again, what this person did was inexcusably petty and stupid. But the justice system should try his case fairly. His probably overworked defense lawyer is correct in pointing out that IBM is not a criminal investigation team. They are not the law. IBM is notorious for overcharging, overbilling, and frequently underperforming, and as a for-profit company should not be used as the sole source of information for what the cost of an intrusion works out to be.
Justice should be blind, but not to the source of their numbers. The principle of fair trials for everyong outweighs the stupidity of this particular person's action.
But why didn't they quote Sony... (Score:2, Insightful)
How come they got left off for committing a more heinous crime than this poor idiot who did something under "emotional stress"?
How come Sony gets to pay $7.50 for such a crime for which we pay $220/- to GeekSquad to get it repaired?
My first question:
1. Why didn't those stupid lawyers for this poor guy quote Sony as a precedence and make the Judge "let go" of this guy with just a $7.50 fine?
2. if that was not possible, why didn't they argue his error made only ONE company vulnerable while Sony actions have made hundreds of computers in possibly atleast 50 companies MORE vulnerably? That would have made the Judge sit up and either throw out Sony settlement / atleast question it, and MOST important of all, made the Judge let off this poor guy.
3. If both are not possible, and Now that THIS guy's case becomes a precedence, make the same Judge apply the same rules to Sony and make those executives suffer Jail time?
Sheesh !
What fuckin' justice system we have !
Corporates and corporate idiots who cause millions of dollars in damage to personal property by producing rootkits and like are let off OJ Simpson style, but the poor idiot who does the SAME thing in MUCH SMALLER proportion and in anger gets a jail time.
This guy should go and apply work at Sony Music or BMG.
Re:IBM ineptitude (Score:3, Insightful)