06/09/2006

Roger Duronio has recently gained fame as the IT guy you shouldn’t annoy.

It seems he works (err, worked) for a bank called UBS Paine Webber, making a nice comfortable salary of $125,000 a year. He expected a hefty bonus of $50,000, but was sorely disappointed with a mere $32,000 bonus.

Unhappy with this, he decided to take a bit of revenge on his company… so he created a malicious piece of software that deleted all files on the bank’s central server, and then moved to all branch servers and did the dirty work there as well. The program worked nicely, erasing files from every server in every branch. A total of 2,000 servers went down in flames.

In what can only be described as a classic IT situation, backup files didn’t work. Everything Duronio’s little program erased is gone. The bank called in 200 IBM support engineers for what was probably the largest IT firefight of the year, and the director of IT for the bank said the disaster rated “a ten-plus” on a scale of one to ten.

Wow. Never, never make the IT guy mad.