In a world where security breaches are increasingly blamed on external attackers, the threat from insiders is often overlooked, which can have serious consequences. One recent attack by a former employee, who planted a malicious logic bomb that was triggered when his own Active Directory account was disabled, should serve as a wake-up call to organizations that trust and privilege but insufficiently monitor. According to the 2024 Insider Threat Report by Cybersecurity Insiders, 83% of organizations experienced at least one insider attack in the past year.
This sabotage did not occur through malware or an external breach. It was not a misconfigured firewall or phishing attack. It was instead a premeditated, planned act committed from within the company’s own infrastructure, with legitimate admin access and native tools. The price tag? En masse user lockouts, administratively locked-out accounts, lost config backup, and a scrambling response team struggling to regain control.
The Insider Behind the Script
This individual was a senior DevOps engineer or sysadmin who had access to the foundational infrastructure. He had spent years building and running deployment pipelines, scripting automations, and managing internal authentication systems. He possessed a deep privilege level in the organization’s Windows-based Active Directory (AD) environment, the hub of identity and access control.
Once his job was cut as per normal HR procedure, the IT team did their bit by disabling his AD account. They were unaware that this basic step would be the catalyst for an evil sequence of action that had been planted months earlier.
Step 1: Laying the Trap in PowerShell
The sabotage was a form of a logic bomb, an automatic script to run in the company’s internal automation system. The script, encoded in PowerShell and stored in a maintenance routine folder that was set for automatic maintenance, continuously monitored whether the former employee’s AD account was active.
A simplified version of the logic looked like this:
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