A former Clayton County corrections officer was indicted Tuesday for allegedly hacking into the emails of former Sheriff’s office employees.
Rhonda Denise Allah was charged with five counts of computer theft for somehow going into the email accounts after she was fired.
Between July 19 and Sept. 9, Allah, 49, is accused of illegally accessing what Sheriff Kem Kimbrough called confidential documents.
“Any e-mail that spoke to our operations, she was looking at,” Kimbrough told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
According to the indictment, Allah would forward the emails to her own Yahoo! email account.
Among the messages prosecutors claim she swiped were ones titled “Items for Justice Bureau Meeting 07/18/11,” “Job Descriptions,” “revised rules and regs,” and “Enforcement SOP.”
“She also made several attempts to cover her tracks by deleting the emails she sent to herself,” Kimbrough said.
Allah had been dismissed from the Sheriff’s office staff earlier in the year for allowing a knife to be brought into the jail.
“She was a sergeant and she was supervising [inmate] intake,” Kimbrough said. “She took the knife from the inmate and set it aside … and lost it.”
Allah’s activities were noticed, he said, when an employee logged on to his email while she was hacked in.
“He noticed sent emails he hadn’t sent and saw that they were all going to an unfamiliar address,” Kimbrough said.
Sheriff’s investigators traced the emails and noticed more in the email system, eventually establishing a pattern and a trail Kimbrough said led back to Allah.
It is unclear how or why Allah allegedly went rifling through the emails. But Kimbrough said his department has no tolerance for illegal behavior.
“Do your job and confine yourself to following the rules and regulations,” he said, “because often those rules are bolstered by law.”
A Clayton County magistrate judge issued a warrant for Allah’s arrest late Tuesday afternoon. When taken into custody, she will be held in the Clayton jail on $25,000 bond.
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