Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access
This week’s tale of toxic tech involves a disgruntled ex-employee who had the means and opportunity to wreak havoc.Our story comes courtesy of Yad Senapathy, who serves as CEO of the Project Management Training Institute in Dallas, Texas. He recalls a time many years ago when he used to work in IT at a company with more than 1,000 employees.While Senapathy was working there, the company terminated an employee, but nobody cut off his access to internal systems. The angry worker logged back in, then deleted files, locked out other people's accounts, and even corrupted a database.
- ▪This week’s tale of toxic tech involves a disgruntled ex-employee who had the means and opportunity to wreak havoc.Our story comes courtesy of Yad Senapathy, who serves as CEO of the Project Management Training Institute in Dallas, Texas.
- ▪He recalls a time many years ago when he used to work in IT at a company with more than 1,000 employees.While Senapathy was working there, the company terminated an employee, but nobody cut off his access to internal systems.
- ▪The angry worker logged back in, then deleted files, locked out other people's accounts, and even corrupted a database.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/03/terminated-employee-cost-company-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars-because-nobody-revoked-access/5292763 |
| Publication time | Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-03T07:05:01.354Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-03T07:05:01.354Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); SECURITY Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access They had more access than the average Joe, and IT didn't track what needed to be cut off Avram Piltch Avram Piltch US EDITOR US editor Published thu 3 Sep 2026 // 08:00 UTC MOST POPULAR virtualization Broadcom pledges to lock down open source Python, Java libraries ai and ml OpenClaw 2.0 pours glitter on slow-burning security dumpster fire virtualization A cloud engineer walked into a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at theregister.