Jason Yow

The IT director of a nonprofit organ procurement center for more than 200 hospitals in Texas was sentenced last week to two years in prison for intentionally deleting numerous organ donation records and other data after being fired from her job.

Danielle Duann, 51 was also sentenced to three years of supervised release upon completion of her term and ordered to pay more thanb $94,000 in restitution to her former employer, LifeGift Organ Donation Center. Duann in April had pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer.

Court documents filed in connection with the case describe what's becoming an increasingly familiar tale of companies victimized by insiders.

Duann was hired by LifeGift in 2003 and put in charge of overseeing the company's entire IT infrastructure and fired in November 2005 for reasons not specified in court documents. At the time of her termination, Duann was informed in writing that all her access rights had been revoked. The company also took steps to lock all administrator accounts to which Duann was known to have access.

Despite such steps, Duann still managed to access LifeGift's network from her home on the same evening she was fired, via a VPN account that she appears to have previously set up without anyone's knowledge.

Once inside the network, Duann used an administrator account belonging to another LifeGift employee to log into several servers, including the company's organ donor database server and main accounting server, multiple times. Over the next several hours, she then deleted donor records, accounting invoice files, database and software applications, backup files and the software tokens needed to run some applications.

In a bid to cover her tracks, Duann manually deleted all logs of her VPN sessions with the company's network. She also disabled the activity logging functions on the database and accounting servers - making it impossible for LifeGift to identity all of the individual files and applications she deleted, the court documents said.

Duann's sabotage, however, was discovered the next morning by an employee of a network services company that had just been hired by LifeGift to provide backup and disaster recovery services for the non-profit. The employee noticed someone deleting files in real-time from a VPN connection, which he quickly terminated. The VPN connection logs and IP address was later traced back to Duann's home Internet connection. A subsequent search of Duann's home and computer systems by the FBI uncovered more evidence that linked her to the sabotage.

Like countless similar incidents, this one highlights the challenges that companies face when it comes to protecting data and systems from malicious insiders. In this case, the sabotage occurred even though LifeGift appears to have taken most of the measures that security experts recommend when employees leave the company or are fired.

For instance, the company immediately revoked Duann's access privileges after terminating her and disabled all administrator accounts to which she had had previous access. The fact that Duann still managed to access the company's servers just hours later, highlights how difficult it can sometimes be to stop insiders who plan to do harm.

The U.S. White House is determined to follow through on its efforts to make cybersecurity a top priority, despite earlier government efforts that have fallen flat, a top official said Wednesday.

A 60-day review of the nation's cybersecurity stance, completed recently by White House cybersecurity experts, has a list of specific goals, said Christopher Painter, cybersecurity director at the U.S. National Security Council.

"It's not the report, it's where we go after the report," Painter said during a speech at the Gartner Information Security Summit at National Harbor, Maryland. "The action plans ... are concrete steps we can take."

The cybersecurity policy review, unveiled in late May, includes a list of short-term and long-term action plans aimed at improving the cybersecurity of the U.S. government and private Internet users. Among the short-term goals for the U.S. government announced by President Barack Obama: appoint a White House cybersecurity coordinator; develop metrics for measuring improvements in cybersecurity; create a public education campaign; develop a cyberincident response plan.

Painter, who's worked on cybersecurity issues since the early '90s, said Obama's speech May 29 was the first time a national leader has devoted an entire talk to cybersecurity. Obama's emphasis on cybersecurity should demonstrate the seriousness of this effort, Painter said.

But Gary McGraw, CTO at software security and quality consulting firm Cigital, noted that past presidential administrations have also issued cybersecurity reports, and little improvement has come from them.

"We're very good at putting out these reasonable pieces of review," he said. "We're not very good at actualizing those, turning them into action, actually doing something."

Parts of the Obama report look "awfully familiar" to old government reports, including former President George W. Bush's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released in 2003, McGraw said. "The main thing I'd like the government to do is get past talking about talking about cybersecurity," he said. "We've seen a number of reviews, a number of blue-ribbon panels ... around talking about cybersecurity. But we haven't really seen any tangible movement in the government space outside the intelligence community and the [Department of Defense]."

McGraw, speaking by video to the Gartner summit, said he's cautiously optimistic that some of the report's focus on reducing software vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats will have a positive impact on U.S. cybersecurity. He also applauded Obama's emphasis on privacy and civil liberties.

But he questioned one of the main focuses of the Obama report, that the White House needs a cybersecurity coordinator. The coordinator may have limited access to Obama and little budgetary authority, McGraw said.

"It looks to me like cheerleader role," he said. "We don't really need a cheerleader, although I suppose having a cheerleader is better than having nothing at all."

Painter defended the Obama administration's efforts and suggested that many U.S. companies and residents are "ready for a change" in cybersecurity policies. The report sets out many priorities, but they're all important, he added. "All those [priorities] are fairly ambitious things we need to get done, but we need to get them done now," he said.

Cybercriminals are becoming more organized, international and targeted in their attacks, he added.

Cyberthreats have evolved into "incredibly severe attacks," he said. "We have insiders ... we have nation-state threats, a whole spectrum of threats from a bunch of guys."