An IT administrator who had been laid off from his job with US school bus routing software provider Edulog caused its systems to crash and erased its data back-ups.

On November 2 last year, days after Vladimir Shved was made redundant, several Edulog computers crashed simulateneouslym, according to a report in local newspaper The Missoulian. When staff attempted to restart them, the found that back-up files had been erased.

At first, Edulog offered to pay Shved an hourly rate to help restore the systems. However, he demanded that the company give him a three to five-year contract at $100 to $150 per hour, which it refused.

Shved was later shown to have caused the crash himself. Yesterday, he was given a deferred three year sentence for unlawful use of a computer. “I’m sorry about what happened. I think it was my biggest mistake of my life,” Shved told the court.

Shved joins the ignominious ranks of disgruntled former IT admins to have taken revenge on their former employer’s IT systems.

In December last year, a former IT worker for the US division of Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi was jailed for remotely deleting virtual machines that supported its business applications. Jason Cornish, who had also been laid-off, caused $300,000 in damage, and was only caught because he accessed the systems using free WiFi in a McDonalds restaurant. His credit card details revealed that he had been in that restaurant at the time of the attack.

In April 2011, a former employee of fashion label Gucci was indicted for allegedly hacking into the company’s IT systems and locking employees out, causing $20,000-worth of damage. However, it appears that Sam Chihlung Yi has yet to be tried.