After termination: Bank employees throw ex-employer into chaos with an act of revenge

Created: 12/25/2021, 06:24 AM

The FBI warns against vengeful employees.

These can do more damage than cyber criminals.

© Gerald Herbert / dpa

Insider attacks by disgruntled employees can cause significant damage.

This is the experience of a large US bank.

New York - The termination of a New York * bank employee has serious consequences.

After being kicked out, the woman took revenge on her employer by wreaking digital havoc.

As

reported by

, this has significant consequences for both sides.

The exact background of the dismissal is

not known

, according to

.

Juliana B. worked for one of the largest credit banks in the United States, the New York Credit Union, until she was expelled.

What exactly caused her to take revenge on her old employer remains unclear.

Also, whether the act was planned well in advance.

However, considering her reaction, she was likely to have been unpleasantly surprised by the termination.

Dismissal of a bank clerk: Indiscriminate destruction

Two days after her release in May, Juliana B. logged into her work account using her private computer.

Then she remotely deleted over 20,000 documents and 3,500 directories from the company's servers.

According to the indictment, it was able to destroy almost 22 gigabytes of data.

The banker proceeded completely indiscriminately.

Not only did she look at customer data and mortgage applications, she also destroyed files that the bank urgently needed as a backup.

Such backups are used to make the systems usable again after hacker attacks.

Because if malware attacks the computer, the only thing that helps is a complete restart with previously made backup copies.

Revenge action after termination: "So I deleted the data server lol"

It remains unclear how the banker was able to gain access to the data. According to the bank, your account should have been blocked upon termination. An external IT service provider has been commissioned for this purpose. Presumably he has not fulfilled his obligations. The fact that the former employee was able to cause such chaos under the bank's data also does not speak in favor of the external IT security experts.

The bank suffered considerable damage as a result of the act of revenge.

Restoring the data will cost you at least $ 10,000, a company spokesman said.

In an initial reaction, the US federal agency FBI pointed out that such insider attacks can cause more damage than any hacker attack.

Employees often have extensive access rights that even criminals cannot easily acquire.

Juliana B. didn't show a guilty conscience at first.

She wrote to a friend five days after the crime: "You did not revoke my access, so I deleted the file server lol".

In the meantime she has confessed to the fact.