Juliana Barile, a former employee of a credit union in New York, pleaded guilty to unauthorized access to the company’s server and deleting over 21GB data in revenge for being fired.
According to the court documents, Barile worked remotely as a part-time employee until May 19, 2021, when she was fired. Although credit union’s employees asked the company’s IT support to remove the access credentials of the former employee that access was not removed.
Two days later, on May 21, Juliana Barile used this access to log into the company’s systems for 40 minutes. During that time, she destroyed more than 20,000 files and about 3,500 folders totaling nearly 21.3 gigabytes of data stored on the institution's share drive.
The deleted data included files related to mortgage loan applications, as well as the contents of a folder storing information related to anti-ransomware software. The defendant also opened various confidential Microsoft Word documents, including files containing board minutes for the credit union.
Although the financial institution had backups of some of the deleted data, the company had to spend $10,000 to recover data destroyed during Barile’s intrusion.
When sentenced, Juliana Barile faces up to 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine.