Han Bing, a former database manager for Lianjia, a major Chinese real estate agency, was given a 7-year prison term for breaking into company computers and erasing data.

Bing is accused of carrying out the conduct in June 2018, when he reportedly accessed the company’s finance system using his administrator rights and “root” account and deleted all previously saved data from two database servers and two application servers.

Large elements of Lianjia’s operations were immediately crippled as a result, leaving tens of thousands of workers without pay for an extended length of time and necessitating a data restoration effort that cost about $30,000.

However, because Lianjia has thousands of offices, employs over 120,000 brokers, owns 51 companies, and has an estimated $6 billion market value, the indirect costs from the firm’s economic disruption were significantly more detrimental.

examination of the staff
H. Bing was one of the five primary suspects in the event involving the data deletion, according to records made public by the court of the People’s Procuratorate of Haidian District, Beijing.

When the administrator refused to reveal his laptop password to the company’s inspectors, suspicions were quickly aroused.

Chinese media outlets who reprinted portions of the disclosed documents explain that “Han Bing stated that his computer had confidential data and the password could only be handed to official authorities, or would only accept entering it personally and being present during the checks.”

The checks were solely carried out to evaluate the response of the five employees who had access to the system because, as the investigators testified in court, they knew that such an operation wouldn’t leave any records on the laptops.

Finally, the experts were able to pinpoint the activity to particular internal IPs and MAC addresses after retrieving access records from the servers. The inspectors even collected WiFi network logs and timestamps, which they afterwards compared against CCTV footage to validate their suspicions.

The forensic expert hired by the company concluded that Bing had wiped the databases using the “shred” and “rm” commands. Rm deletes the files’ symbolic links, whereas shred overwrites the data three times with different patterns to make it unrecoverable.

Unhappy employee?
Unexpectedly, Bing had regularly warned his employer and superiors about security flaws in the finance system, even emailing other administrators to express his concerns.

He was mostly disregarded, nevertheless, as the departmental administrators never gave their approval for the security project he wanted to oversee.

This was supported by the testimony of the director of ethics at Lianjia, who told the court that Han Bing frequently argued with his superiors because he believed his organisational suggestions weren’t valued.

A similar incident occurred in September 2021 when a former employee of a credit union in New York deleted approximately 21.3GB of records in a 40-minute rampage as retaliation for her managers terminating her.

WordPress, the most well-known and widely used blogging platform, is thinking about removing support for Internet Explorer 11 when its usage falls below 1%.

WordPress has discovered that the cumulative usage of IE 11 is less than 1% using the following three metrics:

according to StatCounter’s GlobalStats, 0.71%.
from W3 Counter, 1.2%
from WordPress.com, 0.46%
When WordPress stopped supporting Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 in 2017, these usage figures were comparable.

WordPress plans to discontinue support for Internet Explorer 11 in the future due to the low number of users and the significant expense of maintaining the browser.

“Regarding the present WordPress user experience, the majority of WordPress users ought to be aware by now that a flag was introduced to BrowseHappy around 13 months ago to not recommend IE. In connection with this, the entire IE11 experience is subpar and comes with a significant maintenance cost for developers “Last week, WordPress clarified in a blog post.

WordPress is requesting feedback from individuals and organisations that still use the browser by March 18th in order to formulate their strategies for ceasing support.

WordPress is not the only platform to stop supporting IE 11.

Microsoft Teams’ web app will no longer be supported by Internet Explorer, and Microsoft 365 would stop supporting it on August 17, 2021, according to a 2020 August Microsoft announcement.

Zuckerberg says Facebook is working with Spotify on a music integration project codenamed Project Boombox (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Zuckerberg says Facebook is working with Spotify on a music integration project codenamed Project Boombox  —  – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others.