Full details on this story here . In the spring of 1996, a small Knoxville, TN firm relied on a single employee to maintain all inventory and financial accounting records, including backups. The employee got wind he was going to be fired and planted an electronic timebomb that went off the first Monday of his firing. All backups were useless and the firm took weeks to recover. According to the San Francisco Chronicle , an unknown hacker amassed 186,126 user accounts from the Internet and had cracked 47,642 accounts before being detected by a graudate student at U.C. Berkeley.
More information is available here .
Internet World, December 1996, was attended by over 50,000 people. The value of the lost information was not divulged. Inc. All rights reserved.