Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case against hard drive destroying director goes forward

Deloitte & Touche LLP v. Carlson, 2011 WL 2923865 (N.D. Ill. July 18, 2011)

Defendant had risen to the level of Director of a large consulting and professional services firm. (There is some irony here – this case involves the destruction of electronic data, and defendant had been in charge of the firm’s security and privacy practice.)

After defendant left the firm to join a competitor, he returned his work-issued laptop with the old hard drive having been replaced by a new blank one. Defendant had destroyed the old hard drive because it had personal data on it such as tax returns and account information.

The firm sued, putting forth a number of claims, including violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Defendant moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. The court denied the motion.

Defendant argued that the CFAA claim should fail because plaintiff had not adequately pled that the destruction of the hard drive was done “without authorization.” The court rejected this argument.

The court looked to Int’l Airport Centers LLC v. Citrin, 440 F.3d 418 (7th Cir. 2006) for guidance on the question of whether defendant’s alleged conduct was “without authorization.” Int’l Airport Centers held that an employee acts without authorization as contemplated under the CFAA if he or she breaches a duty of loyalty to the employer prior to the alleged data destruction.

In this case, plaintiff alleged that defendant began soliciting another employee to leave before defendant left, and that defendant allegedly destroyed the data to cover his tracks. On these facts, the court found the “without authorization” element to be adequately pled.

4 Comments

  1. Joe
    July 29, 2011

    Couldn’t the defendant have just erased his financial information instead of replacing the entire hard drive?

    1. Alton
      September 10, 2011

      I personally have seen in Cisco networking academy material that the best way to destroy data permanently is hammering it. Lol. They could’ve used some forensic recovery tools to pull the data back even though it was “deleted”

  2. Bill Silverstein
    July 30, 2011

    They could have deleted the files, but they could be recovered. If they had erased the files, then wiped the unused areas with random data and then defragged the disk, then it might be recoverable. This of course is presuming that it is a hard drive, not a SSD.

  3. Matt
    August 1, 2011

    Very interesting. I’m sure he didn’t delete any information belonging to the company, and more than anything, returned the computer in closer-to its original condition than it would have been. Wild case.

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