If you fire an employee, be extremely polite to him and make sure that all his requirements are met, give him recommendations and severance pay. Especially if this is a programmer, system administrator, or a person from the DevOps department. Incorrectness on the part of the employer can be costly.
In the British city of Reading over 36-year-old Stefan Needham (Steffan Needham, pictured). After a nine-day trial, a former employee of the IT department of one of the local companies received two years in prison.
Stefan Needham worked for a digital marketing and software company called Voova for only four weeks before he was fired. The man was not in debt. Immediately after leaving on May 17 and 18, 2016, he used the credentials of his colleague, logged into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and deleted 23 instances of his former employer.
Needham pleaded not guilty. Two charges were brought against him: unauthorized access to computer materials and unauthorized modification of computer materials. In both cases, we are talking about a violation of the Computer Misuse Act. The court handed down a guilty verdict in January.
According to the police, as a result of the employee's destructive activities, his former employer lost large contracts with transport companies. The total damage is estimated at about Β£500 (about $000 at the exchange rate at the time). It is reported that the company was never able to return the deleted data.
It took months to find the perpetrator. Finally, Needham was identified and detained in March 2017, when he was already working as a devops for a company in Manchester.
During the course of the trial, security experts agreed that Voova could have taken better security measures. For example, implement two-factor authentication (2FA), which would make it much more difficult for Needham to sign in to his AWS account.
Source: habr.com