A California man has been sentenced to a year in federal prison for hacking into his former employer’s computer system and giving spammers access to the mail server.

Steven Barnes was also ordered to pay a fine of over $54,000. Prosecutors say Barnes hacked into Akimno Systems’ network, turned the mail server into a massive open relay which sent out so much spam that the company’s email service was restricted, deleted its Microsoft Exchange data base, and compromised core boot files. Barnes pleaded guilty to the charges.

In a sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutor Shawna Yen urged U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to sentence Barnes to 16 months. She said it was necessary to “send a message to future would-be hackers that this kind of crime - namely, intentionally attacking a company’s computer system and wreaking damage to the company’s business - is taken seriously by the courts.”

Barnes’ former employer is partly to blame however. Amazingly, they had no firewall installed and had not deleted his user account or changed the network passwords after he was fired over 4 years ago! Such lax security is inexcusable these days, and hopefully Akimno Systems has learned a valuable lesson.