61-Year-Old Plano Man Who Hacked Into His Former Company Will Spend 5 Years in Prison

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/09/61-year-old_plano_man_gets_fiv.php

By Eric Nicholson
Dallas Observer
Sep. 6 2013

Despite what its name implies, Exel Transportation Services does not 
actually transport anything. It's what's called an intermodal marketing 
company; basically, it helps other companies ship things. Not the sexiest 
business to be in, but lucrative enough to convince Exel CEO Michael 
Musacchio to jump ship in 2004 after a dozen years with the company and, 
after the expiration of his non-compete agreement, launch a competing 
firm.

But Musacchio, a 61-year-old from Plano, wasn't content merely to compete 
with his former company. He wanted to crush it. To that end, he poached 
some key employees from Exel, including a vice president, Joseph Roy 
Brown, and John Michael Kelly, a key figure in the company's IT 
department, for the new firm, Total Transportation Services. Together, 
they settled on a surefire way to gain a competitive edge: illegally 
reading through Exel executives' email.

Musacchio would have been wise to remember that digital footprints are all 
but impossible to erase. Either through ignorance or hubris, he did not, 
which is how the federal indictment charging him with hacking into 
protected computers came to be sprinkled so liberally with quotes from 
conversations with his loyalists as they trolled through the email 
accounts of their competitors.

And so, when Brown would forward a particularly juicy bit of information 
-- an upcoming budget, maybe, or news that Exel was the target of a 
potential takeover -- we know that Musacchio would respond with words of 
encouragement like "you are the Man!" and "You are on fire! Take a look at 
Toad's email and see if he is sucking up to Jim!"

[...]



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