Disgruntled Employee Takes Citibank Offline (2013)

Mon Dec 23, 2013

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Image: A Citibank location with a woman carrying an umbrella walking in front of it

On this day in 2013, disgruntled Citibank employee Lennon Brown took down 90% of their North American servers before leaving work that day.

Earlier that day, Brown’s supervisor had had a conversation with him regarding his performance at work. Two minutes before leaving work, Brown transmitted a command to ten Citibank Global Control Center routers, erasing their running configuration files and resulting in a loss of connectivity to ~90% of all Citibank networks across North America.

Brown pleaded guilty in February 2016 to an indictment charging one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. A text sent by Brown, read during his sentencing hearing, read the following:

“They was firing me. I just beat them to it. Nothing personal, the upper management need to see what the guys on the floor is capable of doing when they keep getting mistreated. I took one for the team. Sorry if I made my peers look bad, but sometimes it take something like what I did to wake the upper management up.”

  • MyNameIsIgglePiggle
    133·
    1 year ago

    It just occurred to me that we are the lowest paid, highest power workers in the office. Do you think the cute graphic design chick in the marketing department can take down the whole business? No.

    Accounts receivable and payable can stop doing their thing and it will go to shit, but not Instantly.

    Even ceos can order something dumb and it will take a good amount of time to execute.

    • stevehobbes@lemmy.world
      46·
      1 year ago

      Lots of folks can destroy a business for a while if they try to. This is a weird dick measuring contest.

      And feels vaguely sexist towards people in marketing.