Employee Hijacked CEO’s PowerPoint to Show Porn

An angry employee who hacked his boss’s PowerPoint presentation so that it showed a pornographic image has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence and 100 hours of community service by a Judge in the US.

The embarrassing event happened in September 2009 as the Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems (BSAS) CEO, Greg Warren, was giving a presentation on a 64-inch screen to city officials on his organisation’s programs to help drug rehabilitation in the Maryland city.

Suddenly, the PC shut down and the image of a naked woman appeared on the screen, planted there remotely it later turned out by 52 year-old Walter Powell, an IT support manager fired only days earlier by BSAS.

Powell was said to have used his access to the organisation’s systems to plant a keylogger which helped him to steal the passwords of at least five other BCAS employees as they worked. Over a 32-day period, Power accessed the BSAS network over 100 times, it was reported.

Not content with this he stage-managed the PowerPoint porn hijack, accessed the CEO’s email account, forwarding confidential emails to others and composing and sending a further fictitious email to a public distribution list.

The attack cost the organisation $80,000 (£50,000) to audit systems and put in place better security, the CEO told the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

Court cases featuring admins accused of running amock seem have been getting more commonplace. In April, an IT employee of fashion house Gucci was charged with attacking the company after being fired, causing $200,000 worth of damage.