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A court has ordered a UK hacker to pay compensation after he used a purloined laptop to hack into his ex-employer's personnel database. Colin Parker, 31, gained unauthorised access to staff contracts containing salary details and emailed this to around 400 workers at his ex-employer, CHI and Partners. Parker's attempt to …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Alert sys admin...

    alert sys admin, who intercepted and deleted the potentially incendiary emails.....

    Really?

    Either they have someone sat there reading all inbound emails, or someone probebrly said "We've just got a load of emails with everyones salary in". He then duely deleted them (after making a backup of course).

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    1. Colin Miller
      Reply Icon

      400 entries on To: or CC: fields

      An email with 400 entries on To: or CC: are likely to trip an spam alert; perhaps the email was then sent for admin approval, who blocked it, and sent it to the bosses.

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    3. Sir Sham Cad
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      Alert automated tools

      There are Data Leakage Prevention suites out there which can identify "sensitive data" in terms of either files or parts of files, and do various stuff with it if someone attempts to email it.

      Usually there'll be a "hold it as pending, send an email alert to sysadmin and await his/her instructions" action configured.

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  2. Shane8
    Stop

    "unauthorised access"

    was this via a 'test' account or did they forget to disable his login details? Did this laptop he steal contain login details ? sounds dodgy to me....

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Still the same to him

      The lappy may have had saved creds on it, which yeah is questionable and the company needs to bang some heads together if so, but that doesn't change the fact he was unauthorised to be using those systems, and breaking laws by doing so.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Salary disclosure

    I thought that employers were legally bound to disclose the salaries of all employees to all other employees nowadays.

    If so the ex-company should be prosecuted for keeping salary details secret.

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    1. EvilGav 1
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      Partially True

      There is a duty on employers to disclose salaries, but only the numeric amounts (even then, they don't "have" to), as soon as it's attached to a name or staff number it would be a DPA breach.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      salary details

      Are considered confidential info.

      Also the company can shaft some people by paying them less.

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      1. Neil 8
        Reply Icon

        Sort of...

        Gagging clauses are unenforcable in certain circumstances now. Not that HR types will be too worried...

        http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/news/1017963/Pay-secrecy-policies-need-close-scrutiny-Equality-Act-2010-comes-force/

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    3. Dave Cradle
      Reply Icon

      According to HR...

      Are they balls.

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  4. James 5

    In Norway...

    .. this wouldn't have been an issue - everyone's salary and all sources of income are published on-line I believe. So you can check exactly how much your co-workers and neighbours earn, how much tax they pay etc.

    They may even publish their MPs expenses .....

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Unhappy

      Yes, but this is Britain.

      Here we try to keep everything secret because someone, somewhere will one day use it as evidence against you.

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  5. Lottie

    But doesn't he know?

    It's wack to hack!

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  6. heyrick Silver badge

    A common no-good practice that ought to be stamped upon...

    ...is to ask, in the course of an interview, what you think your salary should be.

    If you ask too much, you don't get hired.

    If you ask too little, you may get hired, and if you are you're paid what you asked.

    I once worked in a place where everybody was paid wildly different amounts to do the same job, ranging from minimum wage (the girl with zero self-confidence) to four times that (the guy with too much confidence).

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