I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

Re: @Ellier ... This will impact others as well

Here it wouldn't be because sysadmin isn't a professional designation.

If he was an engineer and did this he would be guilty of professional negligence. But as a mere nuclear physicist I'm not considered a professional so anything I do that happens to leave a crater is considered just a D'oh moment.

Re: @Ellier ... This will impact others as well

Actually had this happen on one system I was working with. Another Admin "forgot" where he was and typed the command only to realise a fraction of a second after he hit enter that he had forgotten to chdir to the trash folder he meant to clear.

Thankfully the backups from the previous night were intact.

Re: @Ellier ... This will impact others as well

"Mens rea" is not in itself a crime. You can intend to be a total dick, intend to be nasty, intend to be any number of things. You have a guilty mind. But in order to commit a crime, you also must have broken the law as it is written. Not as it maybe SHOULD have been written, but whoever wrote it probably didn't have this scenario in mind. It's one of those weird edge cases.

If there is a loophole in the law as it currently stands, you're off the hook. If it needs fixing, that's up to the legislature to do, but they can't do it retroactively. If your act was, by the wording and letter of the law, legal at the moment you did it, then it was legal period. Regardless of your intentions.

And really, it could be solved by some simple wording in the employment agreement or contract. "Network users and administrators are not permitted to undertake malicious actions with the intent of damaging or disrupting the network or any device or data stored on it without the express permission of (insert here) or higher." There you go, now they're clearly not authorized to do it and you've closed the loophole.

rm -fr @IMG

I used to run HPC clusters where doing this on the compute nodes would not have been quite as catastrophic as on a normal system. They would probably have rebooted OK.

The reason for this is that / was always copied into a RAMfs on boot from a read-only copy, /usr was a read-only mount and most of what would normally be other filesystems were just directories in / and /usr. It's true that /var would have been trashed, and any of the data filesystems if they were mounted would also have gone, but the system would have rebooted!

On a related note, when the clusters were decommissioned, I was the primary person responsible at all stages of the systematic, documented and verified destruction of the HPC clusters. It ranged from the filesystems, through to the deconstruction of the RAID devices and scrubbing of all of the disks (about 4000 of them), the destruction of the network configuration and routing information, deleting all of the read-only copies of the diskless root and usr filesystems, even as far as the scrub of the HMCs disks (it's interesting, they run Linux, and it was possible to run scrub against the OS disk of the last HMC [it was jailbroken], while the HMC was still running!)

The complete deconstruction, from working HPC systems to them being driven away from the loading bay took 6 (very long) working days, and finished with a day's contingency remaining in the timetable.

So I am one of a relatively small number of people who can claim that they've deliberately, and with complete authorization, destroyed two of the top 200 HPC systems of their time!

I had real mixed feelings. It was empowering to be able to do such a thing, and upsetting, because keeping them running was almost my complete working life for four years or so.

Re: @Ellier ... This will impact others as well

If you have been a sysadmin as long as I have you would have done it at least once. Failing that you would have done the even more unpleasant chown -R X:X / or chmod -R 0xxx /. Either that or doing chown or chmod recursively on . being in the wrong directory.

Of course I know it will cause harm. You still sometimes do it even after 20 years of experience (I re-read my command lines at least 3 times if I use the -r (or -R) flags).

Start there and you'll find his actions to be criminal Even if we do so, it is criminal damage which funnily enough in USA (and many other jurisdictions) attracts an order of magnitude smaller penalty than unauthorized computer access.