Fired IT Admin Faces 10 Years in Prison for Wiping Servers

A former system administrator who wiped staff credentials from the servers of the company that fired him could face up to ten years in prison. After Joe Vito Venzor was fired by boot manufacturer Lucchese in September last year, he became “volatile” and was forcefully evicted from the building after an hour, according to the El Paso Times. Later that morning, a network administrator – which later turned out to be Venzor – remotely logged into Lucchese’s computers and shut down the company’s e-mail servers. Venzor was then arrested by the El Paso Division of the FBI in October, “following an investigation into allegations of unauthorized intrusion upon protected computers.”

In a statement, made upon Venzor’s arrest, FBI El Paso said:

“He is charged by a criminal complaint with knowingly causing the transmission of a program, information code, or command, and as a result of such conduct intentionally caused damage without authorization to a protected computer. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a maximum $250,000 fine upon conviction.

Regarding the arrest, Special Agent in Charge Douglas E. Lindquist stated, “FBI El Paso takes every cyber investigation seriously, because of the negative impact one person with cyber skills can have on El Paso businesses and their employees who work hard here every day.””

Venzor is set to appear in court on Tuesday (4^th April) and could face a fine of $250,000 – the amount Lucchese estimates that it lost due to the incident, which includes loss of sales and hiring of nes staff to solve the issue – and up to ten years in prison.