turmacar
Ab-so-fucking-lutely.
For a job that requires a lot of reminding people “that’s not your laptop, that’s the companies’ laptop”, a lot of people get awful invested in “their servers”. Just let it go.
I know their business decision, however misguided, was very personal. Prove their mistake, which they will never know or care about, by moving on to the next job. Not by trying to be the sub-villain in a B-movie.
That feels like a very… hopeful interpretation. Instead of “In my expert opinion there is no non-malicious use of this component, and SysadminX was the only one with possible access.”
Intent is not always necessary, it depends on the charges.
Computer Forensics isn’t a new discipline at this point. People have literally gone to jail for putting in kill switches. It’s possible SysadminX is actually smarter than teams of people that are dissecting what happened after they were fired and is a real life Keyser Soze, but it’s extremely unlikely.
The Judge and Jury don’t have to know how a kill switch works. The Judge and Jury have to believe the expert testimony that one was placed and caused damage.
Sam Bankman Freed didn’t get jail time because the judge and jury understood the nuances of cryptocurrency and financial scams.
I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.