Jury deliberating in computer sabotage case

A jury started deliberations in U.S. District Court in Miami Thursday morning in the case of an IS worker accused of downloading a virus that shut down his employer's network for nearly two days.

Herbert Pierre-Louis, who was a hardware engineer at Purity Wholesale Grocers, is being charged with two counts of computer sabotage for the June 18, 1998, incident at the $1.5 billion national grocery outlet based in Boca Raton, Fla. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Boscovich says the damage was well over the $5,000 waterline that is one of the key factors making this a federal crime.

The jurors were sent into deliberations at 9 a.m. this morning after hearing six days of arguments, which included testimony from Pierre-Louis himself. Manuel Casabielle, Pierre-Louis' attorney, says his client did not attack his own network. Casabielle says he believes it was an inside job that was set up to look like it was perpetrated by Pierre-Louis.

``Every indication points to it being someone within the company who had access to passwords,'' says Casabielle in an interview immediately after arguments ended.

The defense attorney explained that the virus - called a Monkey Dropper that prevents the system from booting up - was transmitted from Pierre-Louis' home computer to computers at two Purity Wholesale customers that had direct access to the grocer's network. Casabielle says, however, that someone hacked into Pierre-Louis' home computer and simply used it as a conduit.

``Isn't it silly that a person transmitting a virus would use his own phone line? We basically admitted that the virus was in fact transmitted using those phone lines but there is ample evidence of scripting going on,'' says Casabielle. ``Somebody used a script to manipulate [Pierre-Louis'] computer to make the calls and transmit the virus... That tells me somebody else did it. Why would you use a script to get on your own computer to send a virus?"

Casabielle says the government claimed that Pierre-Louis sabotaged his employer's network after being reprimanded for coming in to work late.

Boscovich declined to comment on the case until the verdict is in.

Pierre-Louis, according to Casabielle, worked for Purity Wholesale Groceries for slightly less than a year.

If convicted, he faces up to five years for each of the two counts.

According to federal law enforcement agents, this case, which comes a little more than a year after the first federal criminal prosecution of computer sabotage, is just one in a growing number of insider-based network attacks. Another case is getting ready to go to trial in Las Vegas in October. In that case, a network consultant is charged with sabotaging the computer network of one of his clients, Steinberg Diagnostic Medical Imaging in Las Vegas. Sandusky is charged with three counts of network intrusion for changing passwords in the network, locking company administrators out of their own system.

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