Sysadmin sentenced for attack on company's servers

By Robert McMillan

November 3, 2008 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - A systems administrator last week was sentenced to six months in prison for sabotaging three servers at his former workplace.

Priyavrat Patel had pleaded guilty in federal court in January to knocking out the servers over the long Thanksgiving weekend last year, critically damaging operations at his former employer, Pratt-Read Corp., a 200-year-old toolmaker in Shelton, Conn.

Patel has separately agreed to pay $120,000 in restitution to Pratt-Read. The company had fired him about a month before the incident, ending his eight-year stint as a contract systems administrator there.

In the court filings, prosecutors said that Patel accessed the Pratt-Read servers from home after he "had a few drinks." According to the plea agreement, he deleted critical files used by the servers during boot-up, knocking e-mail, database and administration servers offline.

The attack crippled Pratt-Read operations for two weeks, forcing the company to use paper records for a portion of that time, according to court filings. "Without the deleted operating system files, the servers could do nothing when restarted, except print an error message," prosecutors contended.

Patel's attorney argued that the recovery was slowed because Pratt-Read caused additional damage during repairs.

This version of this story originally appeared in Computerworld's print edition.

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