Hacks don't pay, especially if your name is Sam Chihlung Yin

Yin, a former employee of Gucci, was indicted by the District Attorney of New York for hacking into the company's servers.

Yin, 34, worked as a network engineer for the Manhattan-based designer of Italian luxury goods and clothing . During his time at Gucci, he created a fake employee account to access and control the company's computer system. The company provides employees with remote access to its virtual private network with a USB card.

After he was fired from his job, Yin used his access card and tricked Gucci's IT workers into activating his fake employee account. From there, Yin wreaked havoc by eliminating access to documents and emails in Gucci's server. According to prosecutors, Yin cost Gucci more than $200,000 in diminished productivity, restoration and remediation measures.

Computer hacking is not a game. It is a serious threat to corporate security that can have a devastating effect on personal privacy, jobs, and the ability of a business to function at all, said District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., in a statement. This Office's Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau is committed to preventing and prosecuting crimes such as the one charged in today's indictment.

In November, six months after his dismissal, Yin continued his destructive streak. This time, he deleted several virtual servers, shut down a storage area network, and deleted a disk containing the corporate mailboxes from an e-mail server. His work not only shut off internal corporate email access for Gucci, but also for store managers across the country and the company's ecommerce team.

He is being charged with Computer Tampering, Identity Theft, Falsifying Business Records, Computer Trespass, Criminal Possession of Computer Related Material, Unlawful Duplication of Computer Related Material, and Unauthorized Use of a Computer. If convicted, Yin faces 15 years in prison.

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