A U.S. federal court sentenced Andrew Garcia, a former employee of monitor maker ViewSonic, to a one-year prison term for using other employees' passwords to break into the company's system, after he had been fired. The 39-year-old network administrator pleaded guilty in October to a single count of accessing a protected computer and causing damage.
In April 2002, approximately two weeks after he was fired, Garcia accessed ViewSonic's computer system and deleted critical files on one of the servers he had maintained, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. The file losses resulted in ViewSonic's Taiwan office losing access to key servers for several days.