Former IT engineer Steven Barnes has been sentenced to one year in prison after pleading guilty to computer intrusion charges. But wait till you hear how it happened.

Baseball bats and server passwords



Neither black nor white.

Barnes, a one-time employee of Akimbo Systems (then known as Blue Falcon Networks), was angry at the way the company had terminated his contract—according to his testimony, multiple company representatives showed up at his home in April 2003, one of whom was carrying a baseball bat. The Akimbo personnel reportedly seized both Barnes' work and personal computers; it's unclear if the latter were ever returned to him.

Actually, it's also unclear why Barnes would allow the group into his home, or fail to report the situation to the police—baseball-wielding MBAs with delusions of thuggery don't exactly qualify as a member of the police force.

Some five months later, on September 30, Barnes decided to test a series of corporate logins/passwords that he knew, even though he assumed that they were now invalid. As he told PC World: "To my complete disbelief, I soon realized... they had no firewall and the passwords were not even changed."

The smart thing to do, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, gentle readers, is to log right the heck out. It's entirely possible that a system admin has ordered the server to flag certain usernames in case a person does log on (if you suspected an employee was really going to try to pull something, keeping an eye on him might actually be more useful than locking him out).

But if you can't resist the urge to snoop around a bit, confine your snooping to snooping. This isn't the smartest idea, and I don't recommend it, but you aren't doing anything to actively call attention to yourself or cause malicious harm.

Revenge hacking



What you don't want to do is precisely what Steven Barnes actually did. Once he realized that he had full system access, the former manager turned the company's email server into an open relay server, deleted the company's Microsoft Exchange e-mail database, and futzed around with the OS installation one way or another to ensure the server would crash on boot.

Akimbo testified in court that it was unable to receive new email or access old messages (keep local copies of your email, kids—if you can), and the company was blacklisted by multiple spam-fighting organizations.

Barnes claims he was struggling with drug and alcohol addictions at the time, which would sort of make sense—he'd practically have had to be high to think he'd get away with this.

He'll serve a year and a day in prison beginning on January 8, 2009, and he has been ordered to pay $54,000 in restitution and spend three years on probation following his release.