Joe Vito Venzor, 41, from El Paso, was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for hacking and destroying the IT network of his former employee on the day he was let go.

According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, the incident happened on September 1, 2016, when Lucchese Bootmaker — a boot-making company headquartered in El Paso, Texas — fired Venzor from his job of IT engineer at the company's help desk.

The firing didn't go as smooth as management hoped, and Venzor became enraged at his former bosses. Court documents describe's Venzor as being "volatile." It took fellow Lucchese staff around an hour to get Venzor out of the building.

Sysadmin uses backdoor account to crash servers

One hour later, the company's production came to a halt. A subsequent investigation revealed that Venzor had accessed the company's network using a backdoor account he created weeks before being let go.

The account's name was "elplaser" — Spanish for "pleasure" — which Venzor used to reset the passwords for the company's other IT staff, and later delete crucial system files from Lucchese's application servers.

Lucchese's email, customer orders system, and systems in Lucchese's production line, warehouse, and distribution center started malfunctioning.

Because Lucchese's staff couldn't access their accounts to fix the issues, the company was forced to send over 300 factory employees home for the day.
Backdoor account tied to Venzor's work laptop

Two weeks later, investigators discovered what happened, and police arrested Venzor a month later on October 7, 2016.

Investigators said they found a file on Venzor's laptop containing a list of all Lucchese admin accounts, including passwords. The order in which these admin accounts were saved in Venzor's list was the same in which the "elplaser" backdoor account reset passwords on the day of the incident.

Investigators also discovered that the suspect had used his Lucchese work email to send this file to his personal email.

Authorities tied Venzor to the hack when they found log entries for the elplaser account tied to the suspect's work laptop.

Venzor pleaded guilty in March and was sentenced on Wednesday to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay a $57,397.76 restitution for the damages caused to his former employee, as IT remediation costs and losses from delayed orders.