Gucci recently came under attack from a disgruntled employee who was laid off earlier in the year.
A former network engineer Sam Chihlung Yin, 34 has been accused of illegally accessing Gucci’s servers and deleting a whole host of data. The attack comprised of shutting down servers, deleting data, as well as preventing employees from all over the country from sending and receiving emails.
The American fashion giant was attacked 6 months after they fired Yin who proceeded to attack the company’s IT infrastructure using a fake user account.
Using VPN access Yin wreaked havoc over Gucci’s systems for over 2 hours before being identified. Investigations revealed that Yin was quite skilful in exploiting the holes in Gucci’s systems through his extensive experience within the company.
He “deleted several virtual servers, shut down a storage area network and deleted a disk containing the corporate mailboxes from an email server.” According to court documents.
Charges included computer tampering, identity theft, falsifying records, computer trespass, criminal possession of computer related material, unlawful duplication of computer related material and unauthorised use of a computer.
Although the act appeared ‘revengeful’ in it’s nature rather than for financial profit Yin could potentially be behind bars for 15 years. In total Yin’s actions cost Gucci more than $200,000.
The New York district attorney Cyprus Vance stated “computer hacking is not a game, it is a serious threat to corporate security that can have a devastating effect on personal privacy, jobs and the ability of a business to function at all.”
The senior technology consultant at Sophos, Graham Cluley emphasised how important it was that companies place emphasis on protecting their corporate networks.
The Gucci incident coincided with the criminal act which saw Conde Nast $8 million out of pocket by tricking the company into paying a fake printing company. It was only a month after paying into a fake account that the scam was revealed.
“So make sure your defences are in place, and that only authorised users can access your sensitive systems.” Graham Cluley wrote on the Sophos company blog.
