A database developer sacked for lying on his CV hacked into systems to spy on his former colleagues and delete emails.

Julius Oladiran, 46, was dismissed from after his employers discovered his boasts of a master’s degree, and top Government jobs were all lies.

Desperate to know what people were saying about him, the conman installed spyware on the office network to track e-mail gossip.

But he also deleted e-mails delegating work between colleagues, which meant the company lost a month’s work on a project, which then collapsed, leading to the laying off of several workers.

The company is not named, but imagine the security risk if this was one of the numerous companies involved in the Government’s obsession with databases. This trickster proves just how easy it can be to gain access to private systems, with the right knowledge.

What protection has the Government put in place to reduce the risk of something like this happening with our own private data?