It’s not often we see malevolent, movie-type plots played out in IT departments, so check this out: Reuters reported that a computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison Jan. 8 for trying to sabotage his company’s servers out of fear he was about to lose his job — the longest ever federal prison term for a criminal attempt to damage a computer system.

The former sysadmin was also ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, pharmacy benefit manager Medco Health Solutions Inc.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Medco administered prescription benefit plans and maintained customer healthcare information on databases using an HP-Unix computer 2 system comprised of approximately 70 servers. The servers also included corporate financials, pharmacy maintenance tracking, web and pharmacy statistics reporting, and the employee payroll input.

As a system administrator, Lin had access to the Medco servers to perform maintenance and run applications.

The 51-year-old Unix pro admitted he modified computer codes and added code to create a “logic bomb” designed to wipe out servers on Medco’s network in October 2003, reports said.

At the time, Medco was restructuring and Lin reportedly feared he might be affected by layoffs.

A vindictive Lin modified and inserted code into pre-existing scripts on the Medco Servers designed to to delete nearly all of the information on those servers. The “Destructive Code” was designed to delete information including databases identifying subscribers, plan coverage, prescription administration, and billing data on his birthday, April 23, 2004.

But on October 6, 2003, Medco laid off four system administrators in the Unix group, but — get this — Lin was not one of them.

But he didn’t let a little good news get in the way of his plot. He left it in place, but the code failed to deploy as planned, so he edited it to go off on his birthday the following year, 2005.

Lucky for Medco, the unauthorized code was discovered by another computer administrator in January 2005.

All joking aside, this is really disturbing, not only because Lin took advantage of his power, but because clearly he didn’t consider all of Medco’s patients whose prescription information would be lost, and the potential harm he was doing not only to “the corporate machine” but to actual people.

Reports show that employee misconduct and unintentional actions like errors and omissions are the greatest cause of data security breaches, so I hope companies like Medco do some serious screenings for criminal minds before hiring people who will have access to our personal data.