Miami Incident Illustrates Insider Breach Trend

I was reading the recent security breach news about Lesmany Nunez, a former IT administrator who was recently sentenced to a year and one day in federal prison for computer fraud. Mr. Nunez was an employee at Miami-based Quantum Technology Partners (QTP) and three months after his employment ended, he was still able to access the company’s network with an administrator password. What he did then was break into QTP’s servers, shut them down, change the system administrators’ passwords and erase files, all of which ended up costing QTP more than $30,000.

This is just the latest example of a disgruntled employee destructing their former employers’ networks as a result of having access to critical information well after their job had been terminated.While it is not clear what the motive was behind this activity it is a clear example of the potential damage caused by former employees. Back in March I blogged for SC Magazine about a similar situation at Fannie Mae where an employee performing a similar deed. When organizations let employees go, whatever the reason may be, they have to make sure that orphaned accounts, such as Nunez’s, are properly deactivated and account passwords changed immediately. Otherwise they leave themselves exposed to these types of vengeful malicious attacks. This is precisely where identity and access management (IAM) initiatives come into play. The right IAM platform provides 360 degrees of employee access management security by providing organizations with the ability to securely authenticate users and streamline application access.

What are your thoughts on this latest insider incident?