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Fired IT Guy Deleted 23 of His Ex-Employer’s AWS Servers: Cybersecurity Trends

When it comes to data breaches and other cybersecurity threats, many people discuss the threats from outside hackers.  But, it’s the internal employees who can do as much, if not a lot more, damage to an organization’s IT infrastructure.  Especially if the internal employee has been canned and is bent on getting revenge.

An article in Naked Security (Sacked IT guy annihilates 23 of his ex-employer’s AWS servers, written by Lisa Vaas) reports that the UK’s Thames Valley Police announced on Monday that 36-year-old Steffan Needham, of Bury, Greater Manchester, was jailed for two years at Reading Crown Court following a nine-day trial.  Needham pleaded not guilty to two charges of the Computer Misuse Act – one count of unauthorized access to computer material and one count of unauthorized modification of computer material – but was convicted in January 2019.

As the Mirror reported during Needham’s January trial, the IT worker was sacked after a month of lousy performance working at a digital marketing and software company called Voova in 2016.

In the days after he got fired, Needham got busy: he used the stolen login credentials to get into the computer account of a former colleague – Andy “Speedy” Gonzalez – and then began fiddling with the account settings. Next, he began deleting Voova’s AWS servers – 23 servers of data in all, which related to clients of the company.

The company lost big contracts with transport companies as a result. Police say that the wreckage caused an estimated loss of £500,000 (about $700,000 at the time). The company reportedly was never able to claw back the deleted data.  And, it took months to track down the culprit. Needham was finally arrested in March 2017, when he was working for a devops company in Manchester.

Prosecutor Richard Moss noted during the trial that security experts agreed that Voova could have done a better job at security.  Most notable was their failure to implement two-factor authentication.

According to the 2017 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) (covered by us here), 81 percent of hacking-related breaches used stolen passwords and/or weak passwords.  But, according to this infographic from Symantec, 80 percent of data breaches could have been eliminated with the use of two-factor authentication.  With two-factor authentication, a stolen password is useless if the thief doesn’t also have the device where the authorization code is being sent.  So, you should implement two-factor authentication wherever possible – Voova sure wishes they did.

So, what do you think?  Do you use two-factor authentication to secure your technology solutions?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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