Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 10, 2013

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REAL LIFE NEWS: MALICIOUS COMPUTER CLEAN-UP LEADS TO JAIL

by Hazed

If you are cheesed off at work, and think you’ve been badly treated by your bosses, you may be tempted to plot some kind of revenge. But beware: taking it too far could land you in the slammer.

That’s what happened to Edward Sobolewski, who has just been convicted of criminal damage at Oxford Crown Court, in England.

He worked for a market research company, and was unhappy about missing out on a pay rise. So over the course of three years he set about sabotaging the company’s computer systems, regularly making them crash. The weapon he used for this sabotage? Cleaning fluid!

After the company spent thousands of pounds paying for out-of-hours fixes and coping with the computer downtime, they started to check CCTV footage of the server room to try and figure out what was going wrong. And they found out: Sobolewski was sneaking into the room, armed with the cleaning fluid. The prosecutor says, “He entered into the room with a distinctive purple bottle of Cillit Bang and the following day he was seen spraying it into the computer grills and then wiping the excess fluid away with a cloth. He is then seen pouring a container of liquid into one of the machines.”

When confronted, he tried to bluff by claiming he was trying to clean the servers, but after he was shown the CCTV evidence he confessed his guilt.

He has now been jailed for 8 months and ordered to pay £1,000 in compensation.

To paraphrase the advertising slogan: BANG! And the server is gone! (Cillit Bang is marketed as Easy-Off BAM in the US.)

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/04/cillit_bang_server_attack_prison_sentence/

Bonus Cillit Bang story: the cleaning product is used to deal with nuclear stains: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8217772.stm

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