[ISN] Broken Engagement Leads IT Worker To Damage Australian Government Data

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:30:04 -0600 (CST)
http://www.darkreading.com/insiderthreat/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215900507

By Tim Wilson
DarkReading
Mar 16, 2009

A man who crashed government computer systems in Australia's Northwest 
Territory last year says he did it because he was drunk and upset that 
his fiancee had broken off their engagement.

According to news reports, David Anthony McIntosh had been living with 
an IT workmate in May 2008, and the two had planned to be married, 
McIntosh said in a letter to a Northwest Territory court last week. But 
when his fiancee broke off the engagement, McIntosh got angry.

McIntosh hacked into government servers using his ex-fiancee's password 
and deleted 10,475 user accounts from the Health Department, hospital, 
prison, and Supreme Court servers. It took five days, 130 experts, and 
more than $1.25 million Australian to find the problem and fix it.

"I'm disgusted with myself for what I did," McIntosh said in the letter 
to the court. "I did not for a second think I would end up in jail." 
McIntosh also said he was trying to prove there were "security 
vulnerabilities" in the system.

[...]


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Received on Tue Mar 17 2009 - 01:30:04 PDT

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