back to article Fired IT manager accused of venting spleen on organ bank

A technology director who was fired from her job has been accused of hacking in to the organ donation company where she worked and deleting donor information and accounting files. According to a federal indictment, Danielle Duann, 50, of Houston, illegally accessed the database belonging to Life Gift Organ Donation Center over …

COMMENTS

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  1. kain preacher

    Evil

    So your pissed off at your ex employee and you take it out on people that need a trans plant. Damn thats evil.

  2. Anonymous John
    Coat

    had the center not adequately backed up its computer systems

    Adequate? According to http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5854484.html "All of the files were back within several months of the hacking".

    Mine's the one with the 300 baud modem in the pocket.

  3. Kevin
    Happy

    Actualy...

    I'm shocked a IT manager actually knew how to screw up a network while not working at the place anymore :)

    Last 6 I worked for had issues turning the Computers on let alone the ability to screw up the servers after they got fired.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    She needs

    some serious and long lasting reforming, hopefully at the hands of some Bull Dyke in C wing.

    Efros

  5. Tom

    Is it any wonder

    that IT security see their own staff as more of a risk than outside hackers?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    put her away

    I find it positively amazing that a person of responsibility would have the testicular fortitude (regardless of gender) to cripple a system holding life impacting information of organ recipients. As Kain put it, that is plain evil. And the sad part is, outside of the torture of being imprisoned with rapists, I can't think of any punishment that would be suitable enough for her.

  7. P. Lee
    Paris Hilton

    @Tom

    Given what happened, I suspect IT security either don't exist or are hiding as best they can!

    Paris, 'cos she knows as much about IT security as this company.

  8. kain preacher

    Only punishment

    The only true punishment would to lock her in the room with the relatives of her victims. But we have abolished such punishment. No more eye for a eye. While some times I think this is the most effective punishment , its not the type of world I would want to live in.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Odd

    She may have just lost it, but there is hardly any reason for an ex employee to go after the company computers.

    Instead you would expect the ex employee to identify the person or persons who lead to their firing and go after them instead. That would make more sense, and expose the person to far less risk, whilst extracting a more focussed degree of revenge.

    When you leave a place, you don't really want it to suffer a crack attempt directly afterwards, as the finger of blame would move in your direction, as could be the case here. And if you were to go after a company, not being attached to the target company, then the best time would be when there was an internal dispute, a firing of one the tech staff, that would give you a patsy.

    And if a company is using a backup system, and you want to trash the company data, then you have to include that backup system in the trashing, possibly injecting false data over a time period, whilst compromising the backup procedure itself.

    And with fairly simple ways of covering your tracks nowadays, I am constantly amazed anyone ever gets caught. So, whilst the system was perhaps a critical system and therefore emotive to some, a lot of things don't stack up. If she is guilty of the act, then as I say I think she must have just lost it, the actions seem very irrational or ones used to create a fall guy.

  10. tony trolle
    Happy

    @Actualy...

    It reads 'Director' not manager small detail but may explain how she turned the computers on :-P

    BTW she worked there for 2 1/2 years.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RE:@Tom

    Being the IT manager she probably knew exactly what they had and how to get round it. Possibly seting everything up befor and thinking she was clever doing the damage from outside the work place.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Remove her organs!

    Oops - awfully sorry, I had a window open on the BBC "Have Your Say" forum. Must have got carried away there.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Oily pusherman

    "The only true punishment would to lock her in the room with the relatives of her victims. But we have abolished such punishment. No more eye for a eye" - which is ironic, given that she used to work for an organ bank. Perhaps she could be put into some stocks, and the disgruntled patients could pelt her with surplus eyes. kidneys, spleens etc. That'd learn her.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They actually had backups!

    Makes a nice change to read this story, and find out that the affected company actually had backups that worked, and that recovery hasn't ended up costing $millions, but a reasonably sensible amount instead.

  15. Doug Glass
    Joke

    Backed Up???

    Backups? BACKUPS?? You mean to tell me there are people out there who actually understand the importance of backing up data?

    From reading all the "humor" stories posted here, and on other sites, concerning the loss of years of data as a result of XP SP3 installation I thought that practice was passe'.

    Buggers!! Papa needs a brand new paradigm.

  16. Sean Ellis
    Stop

    @Kain Preacher

    If my recollection of the teachings is correct, "an eye for an eye" was not a carte-blanche for poetic revenge, but rather a statute of limitations on reparations that could be claimed against a wrongdoer.

    So yes, get back the $70,000. But "locking her up with rapists", as another poster has suggested, is getting us seriously into Daily Mail Reader territory.

  17. Mike

    The lesson here is

    totally discounting the "organ bank" part of the story.

    Always install a deadmans switch, always hide it where is won't be found by most sysadmins. Have it delete itself if you leave on good terms, have it periodically check for the "not yet" command somewhere very public, wait for some internal strife at the company, then release the hounds. Bonus points if it auto replicates to new systems, also takes out the backups, causes a fire, and this happens months or years after you have left the company and they have forgotten about you. BTW the best method for taking out backups is to secretly encrypt/decrypt them through a program shim of some kind so when you take out the system running backups all the backups up to that point are then useless.

    It's the least you could do to repay them for treating you so badly, I mean doing the bosses hot 16 year old daughter, on his desk, during working hours, after you called in sick for the day, isn't against company policy is it?

    not that I have thought much about this ...

  18. Steve B

    Forget the backup encryption password

    As supposedly happened at 1 company I helped recover from an IT Disaster.

    Turned out it was only a ruse as the backups hadn't been working for 9 months but no one had bothered to check despite the tapes being swapped daily and couriered to an off site data holder!

    With all the publicity surrounding similar cases it is highly surprising that anyone is stupid enough to do this, but it could explain why my job applications get thrown out when they see IT Manager as the job title!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Danielle Duann is a loon.

    Did nobody see that she was apparently employed by Lakewood Church at one time? You know, Joel Osteen Ministries?

    http://center.spoke.com/info/crAs3Q/LakewoodChurch

    About a year ago I worked for Lakewood, and it completely fits the bill that she'd pull a stunt like this. She'd strut around acting like she knew everything, and she didn't know the first thing about managing an IT infrastructure! She enjoyed playing God and wanted people to bow to her.

    I guess it makes sense that she threw a temper tantrum over something that didn't go her way. Maybe someone caught her looking up Gucci on corporate time at her old job and she wanted to "teach them a lesson"

    But what do you do? It's important, extremely important for when an influential IT staff member is fired in any company that you CHANGE ALL THE PASSWORDS TO EVERYTHING

    I mean everything, especially the VPN.

    Of course Danielle's a very dumb lady and I'm sure she left a lot of holes. I'm floored that the FBI got involved. She's getting her just desserts.

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