All it took for Tim Lloyd to destroy more than 1,000 of his employer's programs was about a half-dozen lines of code.

Lloyd, employed for 11 years by Stamford, Connecticut-based Omega Engineer Corp. as a network administrator, was convicted in May 2000 of doing US$10 million in damages to the company by deleting proprietary programs.

While Lloyd maintains his innocence, his case represented one of the first federal prosecutions of computer sabotage. Such a situation is every business' worst fear: that employees could betray their trust and attack their computer systems from the inside.

"In most organizations, there is the genuine desire to trust your employees. It's just easier to deal with the world if you think you can trust them," Eric Hemmendinger, information security analyst at Aberdeen Group, told NewsFactor. "But that is not always the case."

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