Going postal, the e-mail, blackmail way
The verb "go postal" has dark roots. It's a euphemism for getting stressed out and losing it completely, and it came into vogue in the US in the 1980s following a number of ghastly killings by postal service employees who had been fired — between 1985 and 1998, 35 postal workers were killed and 26 wounded by disgruntled colleagues. Those who had been dismissed simply returned to the workplace with a weapon and shot as many of their co-workers as they could. But what about employees in countries where the right to bear arms is rather narrowly interpreted, such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe? Can employers there fire workers without fear of retributive rage? Here's a sobering story I came across last week.
A 17-year-old clerk was given the sack, as they say in Britain, by the insurance company Domestic & General for failing to fill in a time sheet. He went home, logged onto this site and promptly downloaded what's called an "e-mail bomber" (Disclaimer: This link is being provided as part of our information service and is not an endorsement of the product or an encouragement to use it) and bombarded his former employer with five million mails. Domestic & General had to shut down its website and reportedly lost ?18,000 as result of the attack.
The youth said: "All the e-mails were harmless — just classic lines from films. I only had to pay for my internet connection. Everything else was free. I just wanted to cause them a bit of inconvenience." Under Britain's Computer Misuse Act, the "bomber" could face the inconvenience of up to six months' jail or a fine of ?5,000 if he's convicted. The incident shows, however, the vulnerability of companies today to those who are minimally tech-savvy. Imagine the damage that a really angry, experienced systems admin or engineer could visit upon an employer if he or she turned vindictive?
In the broader sense, revenge can quickly mutate into terrorism using today's technologies. Take a look at this recent story involving Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which announced that it had helped to smash a Russian gang involved in online blackmail. They would launch a distributed denial of service attack against betting sites during peak hours and cripple them with useless traffic. After the attack, the gang would then make threats by e-mail, demanding between ?10,000 and ?30,000 to stop targeting the site for a year. Blue Square and Betfair admitted their sites had been taken down by the Russians. The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was also hit by an attack on the night of the Super Bowl, paralysing its site for several hours. Looks likes it's time for us to update our definition of "go postal".
