Techie's revenge lands her in jail

A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking - and then locking - her former employer's IT systems.

Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff.

The initial value of the damage she had caused was estimated to be US$5,000.

However Fowler was this week ordered to pay restitution of US$17,243.01 - a revised estimated value of the damage she had caused.

Fowler's attack on the company's firewall, which had caused a "lockout", took Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) three months to resolve.

In July, the FBI secured an admission from Fowler that she had hacked the centre's systems, at which point she handed over the new password.