Ex-Citibank IT bloke wiped bank's core routers, will now spend 21 months in the clink A former employee of Citibank has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for crippling the bank's internal network. Lennon Ray Brown was given the nearly two-year jail term – along with a $77,000 fine – by a Northern Texas District Court this week after he pleaded guilty to one count of intentional damage to a computer. Brown …
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But if he hadn't bragged about it then his superiors would just assume that he'd messed up again - typical incompetent IT staff.
Whereas he wanted to show the world that while his performance might be poor he was still an important person because he could do some damage. But not too much damage, because he only wanted to give them a warning.
He wanted his masters to know that he was somebody... that he could have been a contender!
All the ethical and education issues of this individual aside,this sure seems to make the case for SDN. The idea that a single rogue administrator could wipe out 1/2 of the networking and then cause a significant amount of disruption seems like a big problem. Even though SDN is frequently sold as a cheap way to build a network on commodity gear, the real benefits are in more control of networking configurations and more automation of provisioning. Once SDN take hold, the old days of having a config file deleted from a switch and causing a major disruption will be long gone. All vendors are moving to a SDN strategy, from the smallest to the largest, because it is what the industry needs.
Not sure about that one. SDN is great for desired state config and the ability to use crappy white box switches instead of Cisco gear, but those configs live somewhere and are managed by someone. It wouldn't take much for someone with enough access to turn all of that SDN gear into a bunch of dumb, unconfigured network ports. In theory they could just melt the whole network into a pile of goo by blanking out the software configs. Granted, it's easier to get back online if you're smart and archive your configs, but network admins generally don't like sharing control of things.
On today's episode of "What to do" we will answer a question sent in by Lemmon:
Lemmon: "I'm unhappy in my job and my boss just reprimanded me. Should I burn the place down?"
Answer: "There is no need for theatrics. Anything you could possibly think to do will only cause everyone to see you in a bad light. Instead, just find another job. Preferably one that your skills are matched to. Causing intentional harm, even to computer equipment, is considered bad form and no one will sympathize with you; especially not pointy haired bosses who will make it their life mission to see you hang."
That's it for today's episode. Tune in tomorrow when we explore the downsides of time card fraud.
A BOFH wouldn't have got worked up in the first place - they'd just be slacking in the server room and blinding any manager who tried to call them on it with a barrage of technobabble and excuses the manager wasn't qualified to refute.
To do something like this person did, you actually have to care about your job.
-He overreacted to a bad review. Seriously, let them fire you then collect unemployment if you are in the right. At least cool off and then think about what you're about to do before wreaking havoc.
-He'll never find another IT job worth having.
-He bragged about it. And using poor grammar. And got caught. Unforgivable.
-What did his actions do except inconvenience a lot of people that did nothing to him? If nothing else, it now will look like his supervisor was right on the money with his review, whether or not it's true.
-What "team" did he "take one" for? All that's likely to happen from this is ridiculous security measures and scrutiny that will make it harder for his successors to do their jobs, similar to the idiocy of not being able to take nail clippers on a plane right after 9/11.
A disgrace to our profession. Perhaps he'd be better off finding a nice job in lawn care.
"Seriously, let them fire you then collect unemployment if you are in the right."
Indeed. I think it was on my third or fourth big-company job that I realized, if I wanted to, I could just stop working altogether and it would take at least a few months to get through the procedures required to get rid of me. And this is in 'Murica, working for at-will employers. The first bad review is just the first step. When you get one of those, the grown-up thing to do is to use the time you have left to find other work, since you've been targeted for termination already. The immature spoiled kid thing, obviously, is to circumvent that whole process by clumsily sabotaging your workplace.
"He'll never find another IT job worth having."
That I'm not so sure about. IT has a bit of a French Foreign Legion mystique, in that you can just run away to a new location and get a job pretty easily after screwing up badly. I've personally witnessed this -- a company I worked for hired some "rockstar" systems architect who I thought was clueless. I did a little digging and it turned out he presided over a multi-million dollar failed project somewhere else as the chief architect. Now, he's going to have a criminal record so that's going to be a problem. But if he didn't, and just got fired because he was incompetent, all he would have to do is clean up his resume and walk into the nearest technical recruiter for immediate placement. If I were king of the IT profession, that's one thing I'd want immediately -- personal responsibility for bad work and liability malpractice-style.
"I think it was on my third or fourth big-company job that I realized, if I wanted to, I could just stop working altogether and it would take at least a few months to get through the procedures required to get rid of me."
I once worked with a guy who actively, and openly, used to do exactly that. He told me that it took on average about a year for an employer to get rid of him. He used to come in the office for about 11, take a couple of hours lunch, then leave at about 4.
He was obviously mentally ill though, the poor guy. The company never actually had to fire him as he stopped coming in after a couple of months because he reckoned another co-worker was out to kill him.
I could tell you some even more bizarre tales but it wouldn't be fair as he'd be identifiable with just a bit of Googling if I were to do that.
Now, now - gardeners have feelings too!
I reckon that twit will get the engine to drop a cam (assuming 4 stroke) or forget to add oil (2 stroke).
On another note - use SNMP to reboot the routers and wipe the config in order to circumvent TACACS+/Radius.
AC for obvious reasons.
Disclaimer - the garden behind my house either looks like a jungle or like the Goby desert ...
People who commit real (physical) crimes get probation or a slap on the wrist. This guy slowed down a network (didn't even manage to take it offline) and gets 2 years in prison. Priorities, anyone? I've had janitors accidentally cause a bigger outage than this!
He could have shot someone and would have received 6 months in the county lockup.
If he started out as a contractor (a form of job vetting) and then became full time, how did Citiwank not pick up on the fact he was slightly off the reservation?
Looks to me like a classic case of budget constrained decisions having bad repercussions.
Not to mention that his tactic was about as subtly clever as his grammar. A very low level, weak attempt at causing some damage inside a bank network. There's a reason this was not titled "Bank DBA goes postal and erases all data and backup data, then clobbers the terminals at every branch before causing all coffee machines to blow searing hot java all over the execs!"
Simply put, to be a DBA you usually need some specialized skills, the kind of skills smart people have and use to get good jobs, not shitty jobs at some crap bank where you're at best a low-level network guy. No offense to all networking folks, of course, but yes, this is a small-time lashing out of a small thinker. There's no "I'll show them by getting a better job and being successful and happy without them!" It's all self-destruction and self-pity. They probably had the network back to rights in about 8 minutes when the network guys (that don't suck at their jobs) got back from lunch. Still, one less shitty admin pretending to be a quality IT guy to deal with, so there's that.
Given what was possible, it seems unlikely he intended not to damage anything. Then too, Citi, you got remember it was Citi. They were the ones caught pushing "subprimes" and wound up losing three-quarters (or more) of the value of the stock back in the 'oughties. Performance? He might have a point about upper management.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Everyone knows network people are better paid and more respected while DBAs are rounded up in the job center with a large net.
The hierarchy goes like this:
Firewalls & Loadbalancers
Routers & Switches
UNIX servers
Oracle DBA
SQL DBA
VoIP/Telephony
Windows Servers
Desktop support
"...Obvious troll is obvious.
Everyone knows network people are better paid and more respected while DBAs are rounded up in the job center with a large net.
The hierarchy goes like this:
Firewalls & Loadbalancers
Routers & Switches..."
Maybe in support terms. Dunno - have been out of it for many years.
Alternatively it goes along the lines of:
Director
Sales
Pre-sales architect
Architects (take your pick - solution, lead, techincal etc)
Delivery engineers
Site support engineers
Helpdesk
Support managers
;-)
Working in the UK for a US firm and I can see why he lost his shit. While it's inexcusable to do what he did (yes, the grammar part) American managers seem to have an uncanny ability to completely ignore any suggestions from the 'peasant classes' while simultaneously making sweeping changes to systems and processes that worked perfectly well before and are now, and shall be for evermore, fucked. He probably got chewed out for refusing to work an extra 2 hours each day...If you dont sacrifice your first born for the good of the company you are just not trying hard enough.
Guy was also a bit of a noob for bragging about it, he probably would never have been caught otherwise. I have worked in places where a fee key presses would basically have ended the entire company. Obviously, we don't actually think about doing this...you know, because ethics.
There is a strange cult of the Manager in the USA and in American firms, at least in my experience. A Manager is some sort of special being, unquestioned no matter what his or her level of competence. Their main activity, as far as I can see, is to hire sub-managers and deputy managers so that they are managers of managers, and therefore doubly sacred. The opinion of the actual person doing the job weighs nothing. It's very curious. As I come in as a contractor or consultant, I tend to get paid more attention (especially as a consultant), but managers really do end up drinking their own kool-aid and believing themselves special.
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