Ex-Boss Describes Sys Admin’s Anger During PaineWebber Sabotage Trial | June 8, 2006:

On the day a system administrator at UBS PaineWebber learned his annual bonus had fallen short by about $15,000, he leveled an ultimatum at his boss: give him a written contract for more money or he was walking out the door, according to testimony Thursday in the federal criminal computer sabotage trial.

But prosecutors charge that quitting his job wasn’t the only thing on his mind in late February of 2002. They say Roger Duronio, a three-year employee in the financial giant’s IT department, had already hatched a plan to plant malicious code on the network that would wipe out critical data across the country and drive down the company’s stock price.

Once Duronio packed up and was escorted out the building that day, he headed straight to a broker’s office to buy stock options that would pay out if UBS suffered a setback. And that, the government contends, put the final stages of Duronio’s plot into action.

C’mon people… I know we can all quote Kahn from Star Trek II, “Revenge is dish best served cold.” We also have seen the fraction of a penny scam in Office Space. Look at the end results. Kahn died suicide bomber style killing only himself and others on his ship. The Enterprise escaped. Everyone lost their job at Innatech.

This goes even for you non-technical people who think you can do something in the heat of the moment and the system administrators will never know. Believe me, all too often I have had to give to a boss a report of what people did in terms of deleting data. Computers leave a trail which we can follow. Maybe there are people who get away with it? Is it worth jail time that you might be the one who does?