Computer Sabotage - Internal Controls

The most expensive and best-publicized incident of computer sabotage happened at Omega Engineering Corp of Bridgeport, New Jersey. It was a classic example of inside hack attack, whereas a former employee intentionally launched a logic bomb that permanently caused irreparable damage, destroying more than a thousand programs in the matter of a few seconds.

Omega Engineering was a thriving defensive manufacturing company in the 1990s; it used more than 1,000 programs to produce various products with 500,000 different designs for their customers, including NASA and the U.S. Navy (Lin, 2006).

It was the morning of July 31 1996, when the first worker fired up the Novell NetWare 3.12 file server as he always did. This time, however the server did not boot up. A message popped up on the screen saying that a section of the file server was being fixed and then it crashed. When it crashed “it took nearly every program down along with it, destroying