Seems like she didn’t take the news of getting fired very well…
Juliana Barile, a former employee of a New York credit union destroyed over 21 gigabytes of company data as a revenge plot after getting fired. The data included around 20,000 files and 3500 directories consisting of customers’ mortgage loan applications and anti-ransomware protection software.
Barile was working from home as a part-time employee till 19th May, 2021 after which she was fired. After this, one of the credit union employees asked the bank’s IT support to remove Barile’s access credentials to the company’s system but nobody paid any heed to the instructions. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to Barile to take her revenge against the company and two days later, she logged into the system and spent a good 40 minutes, deleting away the company’s files and opening confidential documents. Not feeling any remorse for her actions, she texted her friend 5 days later and proudly told her how she deleted the files on the company’s servers saying, “They didn’t revoke my access so I deleted p drift lol. [..] I deleted their shared network documents.”
The defendant then pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution’s computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired. Fortunately, the New York credit union had some of the deleted data backed up but they still had to spend more than $10,000 to recover the lost files all because of one employee’s petty behavior. “Her petty revenge not only created a huge security risk for the bank, but customers also depending on paperwork and approvals to pay for their homes were left scrambling,” remarked Driscoll, FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge.
The company learned their lesson the hard way and should probably schedule a refreshers course for the IT support team so they don’t casually “forget” to follow instructions next time.
