Employee deleted files

What: Pharmaceutical supplier sued former employee, claiming use of a secure file deletion utility violated federal hacking laws. Outcome: Temporary restraining order granted against ex-employee until court hearing on March On March 9, , Arledge resigned to take a job as a vice president with Omnicare, PharMerica's primary competitor.

Both companies are in the business of supplying equipment and supplies to long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and hospitals. According to PharMerica's version of events, its former employee permanently deleted more than files from his work computer two days before his resignation. That's based on a forensic examination of Arledge's company-issued Windows laptop by E-Hounds, a Florida data recovery firm. In most operating systems, "deleting" a file removes only references to it in the directory structure but the file's contents can remain on the hard drive until they're eventually overwritten.

PharMerica sued. Its complaint claims that Arledge violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act , a federal computer crime law, by deleting the files.

The CFAA says whoever "knowingly causes damage without authorization" to a networked computer can face civil and criminal liability. It was intended to be used to prosecute computer hackers, but Congress did a sloppy job in drafting it. This isn't even the first time that the CFAA has been invoked against file-deleting employees. As Police Blotter was the first to report last year, the CFAA was successfully used in a 7th Circuit case against an employee who turned in his work laptop after using a "secure delete" utility.

In the PharMerica v. Arledge case, U. Dallas police investigated the former IT employee for a possible charge of tampering with government records in connection with the evidence loss and decided his action was not criminal, according to records obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

Zielinski has said about the first batch of missing data that the former employee was supposed to move 35 terabytes of archived police files from online storage to a physical city drive starting March It was supposed to take around five days to move the information.

More than 14 terabytes were recovered. Zielinski said the employee deleted the original files and the backups. Fifteen terabytes is the equivalent of about 5, hours of HD video or about 4 million photos or million pages of Microsoft Word documents.

And An internal audit is still ongoing regarding the 7. The internal review was initiated this month after Dallas County prosecutors learned about the deleted files.

City officials have said they aim to complete the audit by Sept. What to do when an ex-employee starts deleting your company data. Category :- Data Protection. Abtech Marketing February 23, pm No Comments. We had an interesting customer situation to deal with recently here at Abtech Technologies.

One of our StorTrust clients had to let one of their employees go. Nothing too unusual. I guess that person will not be getting a reference anytime soon. So, what could they do to recover the data? They called us up and asked if we could help.

Contact us.