Crime of organ donation center’s IT director gives new significance to “Think before you click”

By Frank Taylor

July 17, 2009

The fired director of information technology for LifeGift, a not-for-profit organization that recovers organs and tissue for individuals who need transplants in North, Southeast, and West Texas, will spend two years in prison for deleting organ donation database records and other applications and files from her former employer’s computer network without authorization. On April 30, 2009, Danielle Duann pled guilty in case number 4:08-cr-00390 to one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a protected computer. United States District Judge David Hittner sentenced Ms. Dunn on July 15th.

The indictment alleged that Ms. Duann not only caused a financial loss to LifeGift but also “caused the modification and impairment … of the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and care of one or more individuals.” Although the fact that Judge Hittner ordered Ms. Duann to pay $94,222 in restitution gives some idea of the amount of the financial loss, it is impossible to measure the damage or potential damage from any disruption of the organ-donation system.

Press releases from the Houston offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Attorney give details of the case and Ms. Duann’s guilty plea and sentence. According to the press releases, Ms. Duann went on her destructive spree after LifeGift fired her on November 7, 2005. Ms. Duann reportedly gained unauthorized access to LifeGift’s computer network via a remote connection from her home and worked overnight to delete organ donation database records, accounting invoice files, database and accounting software applications, and various backup files.

According to the government’s statement of facts, Ms. Duann used a laptop computer and a Time Warner broadband Internet connection at her residence to make multiple VPN connections to LifeGift’s computer network and used another employee’s network administrator account to log onto several of that network’s individual computer servers. The government asserted that the deletion of computer logs and the disablement of certain logging functions made it impossible to identify all of the individual files and applications that Ms. Duann deleted.

We normally associate the advice “think before you click” with matters such as the avoidance of computer viruses and Internet scams. Crimes such as that of Ms. Duann, however, present a mortal as well as a financial threat. Given the number of people who are currently awaiting life-saving organ transplants in the United States, any disruption of the donation network could have detrimental if not fatal consequences.

Regardless of the motivation for her crime, perhaps she was just angry about the termination of her employment, Ms. Duann obviously should have thought about the potentially grave consequences of her actions before she clicked so many times. Her destructive actions took place over the course of approximately 16 hours, so she had ample opportunity to stop.

The United Networking for Organ Sharing keeps a running count of the number of candidates on the waiting list for organ transplants. The number was 102,536 at the time of the preparation of this article. Organdonor.gov, the U.S. government’s official website for organ and tissue donation and transplantation, offers additional information on the topic.

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This article posted August 24. 2009.