Ex-employees sued for hacking

A Chicago insurance brokerage is suing three of its former employees, claiming that they hacked into its computer systems.

The Near North National Group claimed that the trio stole emails and other commercially sensitive information which they then passed on to business rivals.

David Cheley, Douglas Sikora and Craig Jongsma have been sued for more than $645,000, which the brokerage claims to have spent on investigating the tampering and restoring its systems.

According to DataWatch analyst Peter Williams it is one of the few cases where hackers have been personally sued for the damage they have caused.

"This is common in cases of industrial espionage, where the spies have often made a killing by providing the information," he said.

"However, it is less common for them to be billed for the actual computer systems that they have put in place to find the information."