Security News > 2021 > September > Fired NY credit union employee nukes 21GB of data in revenge
Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired.
"In an act of revenge for being terminated, Barile surreptitiously accessed the computer system of her former employer, a New York Credit Union, and deleted mortgage loan applications and other sensitive information maintained on its file server," Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn M. Kasulis said.
According to court documents, the defendant worked remotely as a part-time employee for the credit union until May 19, 2021, when she was fired.
Even though a credit union employee asked the bank's information technology support firm to disable Barile's remote access credentials, that access was not removed.
Besides deleting documents with customer and company data, Barile also opened various confidential Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union.
Although the New York credit union had backups of some of the data deleted by the defendant, it still had to spend more than $10,000 to restore the destroyed data following Barile's unauthorized intrusion.