Former credit union worker Juliana Barile admitted to breaking into the company’s computer systems without permission and erasing over 21 terabytes of data as retaliation for being sacked. Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn M. Kasulis stated that Barile “removed mortgage loan applications and other sensitive material held on its file server” after secretly accessing the computer system of her former employer, a New York Credit Union. Until May 19, 2021, when she was fired, the defendant allegedly worked remotely for the credit union as a part-time employee. Barile’s credentials for remote access were left in place despite a request from a credit union staffer to the bank’s IT support company. On May 21, two days later, Barile checked in for about 40 minutes. During that period, the defendant removed about 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories, totaling about 21.3 gigabytes of information from the bank’s shared drive. Files pertaining to customers’ mortgage loan applications and the financial institution’s anti-ransomware defense software were among the data that were deleted. Barile opened several private Word documents, including files holding the credit union’s board minutes, in addition to deleting papers containing consumer and business information. She also texted a buddy on May 26 five days later to describe how she was able to delete thousands of documents from her former employer’s servers.”I removed p drift since they didn’t take away my access, lol. [..] I removed the shared network files they had. The New York credit union had backups of some of the material that the defendant had erased, but after Barile’s unauthorized intrusion, it still cost more than $10,000 to restore the lost data. The FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Driscoll continued, “Ms. Barile may have believed that by destroying files, she was retaliating against her company, but she really caused just as much harm to customers.””Her petty vengeance not only posed a serious security risk to the bank but also left clients scrambling who relied on documentation and permissions to pay for their homes.” An inside threat can cause just as much damage as an outside criminal, if not more. Now, the bank and its clients must deal with the enormous headache of one employee’s selfish behavior.
Dismissed credit union worker blows up 21 gigabytes
