Computer Sabotage - Internal Controls

The most expensive and best-publicized incident of computer sabotage happened at Omega Engineering Corp of Bridgeport, New Jersey. It was a classic example of inside hack attack, whereas a former employee intentionally launched a logic bomb that permanently caused irreparable damage, destroying more than a thousand programs in the matter of a few seconds.

Omega Engineering was a thriving defensive manufacturing company in the 1990s; it used more than 1,000 programs to produce various products with 500,000 different designs for their customers, including NASA and the U.S. Navy (Lin, 2006).

It was the morning of July 31 1996, when the first worker fired up the Novell NetWare 3.12 file server as he always did. This time, however the server did not boot up. A message popped up on the screen saying that a section of the file server was being fixed and then it crashed. When it crashed "it took nearly every program down along with it, destroying any means of finding them and scattering the millions of lines of coding like a handful of sand thrown onto beach" (Gaudin, 2000). Even when the server was down, however, the programs could be taken off the backup tape and the machines could run. But the backup tape was nowhere to be found. The Plant manager went to the individual workstations to retrieve any programs that workers had saved to their desktops, but there was also nothing to be found. There were no programs and no backup tapes. The manager then made a decision to run the machines with programs that already had been loaded the day before and the machines run like that - some, for days, some for weeks until they choked inventory or exhausted their raw material (Gaudin, 2000).

During the crash - Tim Lloyd, a former employee, who had been fired just three weeks ago, have been called, as he was the one responsible for the security of the system and maintenance the back up tape. He however, did not provide the answer where the tape was or whether or not he had it.

Lloyd worked at Omega for over 11 years. Besides being chief computer network program designer, Lloyd was a company's network administrator and therefore, he knew the ins and outs of the system. He had all the supervisory privileges to make network additions, changes and deletions and he was the sole person in charge of the network he created. He handed out passwords, maintained the server, loaded new programs, worked on any expansions and was in charge of doing backups (Melara, 2003). During the 11 years Lloyd worked at Omega - no one other than Lloyd was assigned to do the backups. Just a few days before he left, he had also taken programs off the workstation and centralized them on the one file server, telling workers not to store them locally any longer. No one ever question what he was doing and why.

Lloyd in fact was a trusted and loyal employee however, during the last year of his employment, he went from being a star employee to an angry man. He was verbally and physically abusive at his co-workers, bottlenecked projects, because he was not in charge of them, and even knowingly loaded fault programs to make co-workers look bad, according to Omega executives (Gaudin, 2000). He was ultimately