IT Admin Holds Client Hostage By Redirecting Company Homepage

Companies the world over give IT admins access to some of their most sensitive information. This is the kind of information that if lost, damaged, or stolen would lead to lost money and business for the company. An Arizona man name Tavis Tso has entered into a plea deal resulting from his actions where he took the domain name of a company and redirected it to a teen porn site.

The incident went something like this. Tso was a contract IT admin for an unnamed company and had done some work for the company at some point. The client company asked Tso for their GoDaddy login information so that it could make some updates to the contact details. Apparently, Tso wasn't too thrilled with the request for some odd reason.

He told the company he didn't have the login information and then proceeded to update the contact information in a way as to allow him to set up his own account with Microsoft and take over the company's domain name. At first Tso made adjustments so that the company website redirected to a blank page and employee emails didn't work.

Tso then told the company he would put it all back to working order if it gave him $10,000. The company refused. As punishment for their impudence, Tso redirected the company website to a teen porn site. The company website reportedly redirected to the porn site for several days while this all went down between May and June of 2015. 

It's not clear exactly how it happened, but after a few days the company website went back to normal. Tso was sentenced this Monday to four years of probation and will have to pay restitution of $9,145. Part of the deal was that Tso pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. The man was sentenced to probation rather than jail time because the US Attorney, Matthew Binford, said the act was out of character for Tso.

The sentencing memorandum read in part, "Given the fact that this appears to be a one-time lapse in judgment, a term of probation is the best way to address the seriousness of this offense, while affording adequate deterrence to future criminal conduct and protecting the public from future crimes." It's easy to think this client company should have been more careful, but it's not like they used "admin" as a password and invited the hacker in.