You have probably never heard of Lennon Ray Brown, but his story should be a salutary lesson for all of us.
He started working for Citibank in Irving, Texas in the United States in 2012. Firstly, as a contractor and later as a staff employee. On 23 December 2013 he was called in by a manager and reprimanded for poor performance.
At 6:03 pm that evening he transmitted a code and command to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers, erasing the running configuration files in nine of the routers, resulting in a loss of connectivity to approximately 90% of all bank networks across North America. Then, two minutes later, he scanned his employee identification badge and left the site.
He was subsequently indicted on a charge of causing intentional damage to a protected computer.
His sentence - 21 months in prison and a fine of $77,000.
There are no reports of how much it cost Citibank to rectify the problems Brown caused.
A text message Brown sent to a colleague shortly after he committed the offence was read out during the trial - "They was firing me. I just beat them to it. Nothing personal, the upper management need to see what they 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 takes something like what I did to wake the upper management up."
Comment
Whilst we do not know what was actually said during the meeting between Brown and his supervisor, there does seem to be an important message for supervisors to take away – be sensitive to the messages being given out by the person being reprimanded and think about the potential risk to the organisation if the disgruntled employee decided to take matters into their own hands.
