The world of luxury and fashion is, in many ways, alien to us regular human beings. Beyond watching repeats of Project Runway, most of us do not get exposed to the inner-working of the fashion industry. While the world of fashion is something that many of us view from afar, one thing recently happened that made the industry seem a bit, well, human.
A disgruntled, former IT worker for the U.S. division of Gucci sought revenge by shutting shut down servers and deleting data causing damage and lost productivity costs estimated at $200,000 in the process.
Here are some more details about this incident from The Register:
Gucci lost access to documents and email for nearly 24 hours, while other documents and emails were permanently lost. The attack relied on the use of a fictitious VPN access account allegedly established by Yin while still on Guccis payroll. Yin tricked his former colleagues into activating a token associated with this account in June 2010, a month after his contract of employment was terminated by Gucci for unrelated reasons in May 2010.
The fashion house called in investigators after the November assault, who tracked the attack back to Yin. In Monday, the alleged hacker was indicted on a 50-count rap that includes computer hacking, identity theft and falsifying business records charges. The most serious charge – computer tampering in the first degree – is punishable on conviction by up to 15 years behind bars.
We have seen this happen all too often. Former employee taking shots at their former companies. And, due to lack of controls, many of these ex-employees still hold the keys to the kingdom. Last week, we did a post about how an entire season of the childrens TV show Zodiac Island had been wiped out thanks to a fired employee at its data-hosting company who hacked into its networked computers. Most CSOs fear the outside enemy often being hackers from rogue nations but often the biggest foe are current and ex-employees. What can companies do to prevent this from happening?
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