Man accused of crashing UBS servers

Bonus sedition

A US court has heard how a disgruntled IT manager allegedly wiped out all UBS Paine Webber servers for a day leaving traders unable to trade because he was unhappy with his bonus.

Not only is Roger Duronio accused of using a "logic bomb" to crash the investment bank's servers he is also accused of going short on UBS shares just before the incident - so if UBS shares fell in value Duronio would make a profit. UBS yesterday asked the judge to keep the trial secret to avoid embarrassment and injury to the bank - the judge refused.

Roger Duronio was paid a salary of $125,000 by the bank and was expecting a bonus of $50,000. When he only got $32,000 he decided to take revenge on the bank, prosecutors claim.

He created the logic bomb which would delete all the files in the host server in the central data centre and then every server in every branch.

Some 2,000 servers did go down and 400 branch offices were hit. Backup systems did not work and files were deleted.

UBS IT manager Elvira Maria Rodriguez told the court: "It was the magnitude of it. How on earth were we going to bring them all back up?...If I had a scale of 1 to 10 this would be a 10-plus."

She told the court the escalation centre was "chaos" on the day and that 200 IBMers had to be drafted in to help fix problems at branch offices.

Duronio's defence attorney said the code was planted as a joke by someone else. He accused UBS, and its first forensics company @Stake of destroying evidence.

More details from Information Week here.