If you are firing an employee, be extremely polite and ensure that all their demands are met, provide them with recommendations and severance pay. This is especially true if they are a programmer, system administrator, or part of the DevOps team. Inadequate behavior on the employer's part can be costly.
In the British city of Reading against 36-year-old Steffan Needham (shown in the photo). After a nine-day hearing, the former IT department employee of a local company received a two-year prison sentence.
Steffan Needham worked for just four weeks at a digital marketing and software company called Voova before he was fired. The man did not hold back. Immediately after his dismissal on May 17 and 18, 2016, he used a colleague's login credentials, accessed the Amazon Web Services (AWS) system, and deleted 23 instances of his former employer.
Needham pleaded not guilty. He faced two charges: unauthorized access to computer materials and unauthorized modification of computer materials. Both cases involve violations of the Computer Misuse Act. The court delivered a guilty verdict in January.
According to police, as a result of the employee's destructive actions, his former employer lost major contracts with transportation companies. The overall damage is estimated at around £500,000 (approximately $700,000 at the time). The firm reportedly failed to recover the deleted data.
Months were spent searching for the criminal. Finally, Needham was located and arrested in March 2017 while he was already working as a DevOps engineer at a company in Manchester.
During the trial, security experts agreed that Voova could have implemented better security measures. For example, they could have enforced two-factor authentication (2FA), which would have significantly complicated Needham's ability to log into the AWS account.
Source: habr.com
