I worked for a skeezy car dealer who promised to pay me every month to support the software I wrote. I set the login program to throw an error message if I hadn't logged in for 60 days. He eventually agreed to pay me a lump sum to cover what he owed me and for future use of the software and I removed it.

The fact that he was able to do all that in a company with “thousands of employees globally” shows how poor their security was. How was a developer able to host his own personal server in the network without anyone seeing it, and why did he have access to enterprise production systems to deploy those scripts?

Lmao. Worth it.

There are easier ways to do this without actively scripting it. Just build something that relies on your account, rather than scripting to check it in order to destroy things. Then you claim ineptitude, rather than malicious intent. It's the "I forgot to create a service account" excuse.

The defendant breached his employer’s trust

The company breached employee trust when they fired a bunch of people during a "realignment".

Four years is far too long. If he had run over the CEO in the parking lot he wouldn't have gotten four years.

For developers in similar situations, where the corporate overlords make your life miserable; use dead man's triggers Instead of a simple killswitch: manually start handling certificates, introduce memory leaks that you can easily clear, have excessive disk filling logs that you can daily clear, and all kinds of other stuff that is a perpetual dumpster fire that you extinguish as part of your job. Oh, and don't forget to forget commenting and documenting. The next developer should instantly learn the pressure they have been putting on you.

Dipshit. Just do bad coding and leave timebombs that could be considered an accident.

No one reviwing his code? Sounds like a timebomb in its self.

company ruins life of employee: stonk

employee ruin company: immediate imprisonment

edit:

Ultimately, Eaton Corp. bore substantial costs getting its network back online

actually, it did nothing to the company but cost it a few bucks. do not pass go/collect $200.

this person was not fired, he was laid off. he was not actively harming the company until the company ruined his life.

Sounds like he could have been a bit more creative in implementing this. Having something immediately traceable back to a username is no bueno.

4 YEARS?! And gaming companies can just build a kill switch into their game and get no penalty?

Have to make an example of them lest the surfs realize they have power

Kinda funny. 4 years seems excessive to me but what do I know.

What he did was brazen and stupid but 4 years sounds a bit excessive. Unless the journalist is under reporting what happened, he didn't do any long-term damage just probably knocked them offline for a day and required somebody to come in and manually reset the drsm account in the domain controller.

But in a fit of rage and passion he built out booby traps and put his name all over everything. He wanted them to know it was him, How do you absolutely denied himself plausible deniability.

All he had to do was pretend he was inept and replace service accounts with his own login. Push 90-day password resets on the account for 'security'. Set up a house of cards out of security certificates.

The company probably walked into that court with a technically competent team of lawyers and a bunch of expert testimony, he probably had a state defender.

I'm curious what this crowd thinks is an appropriate punishment here. No priors, found guilty, caused some lost revenue (which I have to admit doesn't mean you actually lost revenue). So, should they even be sent to jail? House arrest? Or do we just want consistency in punishments?

Good. Some one should sponsor and hire this guy.

this was stupid. A career ending move. no one’s gonna hire someone who wrote a logic bomb at their last job.

Kinda heroic, ngl. I think the prison sentence is appropriate, but if I was let go after 11 years, I’d harbor fantasies of doing something similar. They’d stay fantasies, though.

Slow enshitification is easier and blameless.

No work you will ever do at a job is your labor. Employees are company property, their thoughts and achievements are company property.

It's petty to do this but it shouldn't be possible to get jail time.

I imagine you must be quite skilled to be able to manage your whole-ass company (and run their systems into the ground). So it shouldn't be a problem to get another job after being fired.

Why fuck with your future, just because of your own ego and a drive for revenge? That guy must've watched too many animes.