Anyone in engineering who has advanced beyond intern is probably familiar with the Omega instrument catalog. It's the one with the Dilbert cartoons. Well, Omega had a little problem back in 1996 from which they have never fully recovered.

Tim Lloyd was Omega's trusted network administrator and was in charge of setting up a critical manufacturing network based on a Novell NetWare server. This network controlled all the manufacturing processes for their rapidly growing instrument business.

Mr. Lloyd found his prestige at the company waning, and prepared revenge. He planted a logic bomb in the NetWare server. Soon after his departure, it went off, erasing all data on the server, then purging the recovery directory.

Manufacturing came to a halt. Orders were lost, deliveries not made, and eventually 80 people had to be laid off.

There was only one set of backup tapes, and these had been taken home by Mr. Lloyd. They were found in a search of his apartment, but had been formatted to destroy all data.

Mr. Lloyd's lawyer claims Lloyd was framed. By who, the Easter Bunny?

Further details can be found at Network World and at the Los Angeles Times (but you have to pay for that one).