UBS "Logic Bombing" Pretty Harrowing

Wow if you are an IT professional this story is pretty harrowing stuff. It involved a 2002 attack on UBS PaineWebber by a disgruntled SysAdmin.

On the day of the attack, Rodriguez said that at one point there was "chaos" in the UBS Escalation Center. Systems administrators and other IT workers were streaming into the offices there, asking questions and making suggestions. A room that normally sees six or seven workers was suddenly teeming with 20 or 30 by mid-morning. By noon, she says there were maybe 50 people working on the downed network. Just an hour later, there were hundreds involved across the country.

"Every branch was having problems," she said. "Every single broker was complaining. They couldn't log onto their desktops and [get to] their applications because the servers were down. The brokers might have been able to make some calls to friend brokers, but my understanding was that trading was not doable."

Now that is pressure when guys that are used to moving millions of dollars back and forth and are paid handsomly for it can't even log into their PCs to check their e-mail. That was perhaps millions of dollars in trading profits that cannot be recouped because one disgruntled SysAdmin figured he wasn't paid enough and crashed their system. I would hate to have been working at UBS trying to get their 2000 servers back online from backup tapes. That sounds nuts.