Stories about: WorldCom

Former WorldCom Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bernard Ebbers was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison, imposing what could be a life sentence on the executive held accountable for WorldCom's historic collapse into bankruptcy in the wake of a US$11 billion accounting scandal.

For liability purposes, the courts have declared terrorism to be a predictable security threat. CSOs need to adapt if they want to survive.

Adrian Lamo, who gained a reputation as the "homeless hacker" for his itinerant lifestyle, will be considerably easier to find -- at least for the next few months. Lamo was sentenced Thursday to six months of home confinement after pleading guilty in January to charges that he broke into the internal computer network of The New York Times Co.

Last October's hacker attack on the global root servers that run the core addressing system of the Internet knocked out seven of the 13 servers for a time, but caused nary a problem for most Internet users.

What do you do about someone like Adrian Lamo? Last week, Lamo turned himself in to U.S. marshals at the federal courthouse in Sacramento, California and was charged with hacking his way into the internal network of The New York Times and running up a US$300,000 bill on the newspaper's LexisNexis database account. At that price, you can understand why the Times wasn't as forgiving as WorldCom, Yahoo and other companies that praised Lamo after he found security holes in their networks and then helped to fix them for free.

It's the CSO's job to clearly articulate expectations about corporate behaviour and establish accountability.