News: lovesick hacker cripples Northern Territory Health Department, hospital, prison and Supreme Court servers?
For heavens sake … according to the news report at the URL below it took “130 experts” to “find the problem and fix it” – the “problem” was, apparently, the fact that the “hacker” (and I use that term very loosely) “deleted 10,475 user accounts”.
The incident is explained as:
“In submissions from his lawyer Tom Berkley and prosecutor Paul Usher yesterday, the court heard that McIntosh hacked into the system on his workmate’s computer, using her password.
He was living with her in May, 2008, when he logged into government servers and deleted 10,475 user accounts from the Health Department, hospital, prison and Supreme Court servers.”
Who was this “workmate”? And how the heck did he know her password? Especially a password for a user account that I can only assume had high level administrative credentials? And how can such an unsubtle slash-and-burn attack need “130 experts” and a bill of $1,253,750 to fix?
Cite: http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2009/03/13/38995_ntnews.html