http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=106507



By Robert McMillan

IDG News Service

04 November 2008



An IT manager who logged onto to his former employer's computer network 

five months after being fired and opened the email server up to spammers 

has been sentenced to one year in prison.



Steven Barnes had earlier pleaded guilty to computer intrusion charges, 

saying in a plea agreement that he accessed servers at a San Mateo, 

California, Internet media company called Akimbo Systems and turned the 

company's mail system into an open mail server that spammers could use 

to send out messages.



He also deleted the company's Microsoft Exchange email database and 

files that the computer needed in order to boot up.



In a letter to the presiding judge, Barnes said that he had battled drug 

and alcohol addictions at the time, and was upset after Akimbo 

representatives showed up at his door in April 2003 - one carrying a 

baseball bat - and took both work and personal computers from him.



He logged onto company servers on September 30 after trying an old 

password that had been valid before he was fired. "To my complete 

disbelief, I soon realised... they had no firewall and the passwords 

were not even changed," he said.



[...]





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Received on Wed Nov 05 2008 - 00:02:41 PST