A scorned employee decided to get his revenge by hacking into his company’s system and the act cost the business over half a million dollars in losses after firing the 39-year-old.
The man in question, Kandula Nagaraju, was given the boot from NCS, an information technology company in Singapore, in October 2022 due to poor performance.
After failing to land another job, the man returned home to India where he used his laptop six times to gain unauthorized access to his former work’s computer systems.
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Getting a new job, Nagaraju went back to Singapore and rented a room with a former NCS colleague, accessing the company’s system again through his WiFi network.
It seems like Nagaraju had a plan in place to get his revenge as he started writing computer scripts to test if they would work in deleting servers from a system.
In March 2023, he put his plan into action, deleting 180 of NCS’s virtual systems, costing the company $678,000 in losses.
The business quickly realized they had been deleted and began their own internal investigations.
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A month later, the gig was up for Nagaraju when NCS lodged a police report and handed over multiple IP addresses that they had uncovered.
The police tracked down the culprit and seized his laptop which still had the programme script used to delete the servers on it.
It was also found that Nagaraju had been searching Google for scripts to delete servers beforehand.
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According to court documents, the former employee had felt “confused and upset” when he was fired from the job, claiming that he had “made good contributions” to the team.
His reasoning wasn’t enough for him to avoid jail time though, as on June 10, he was found guilty of the hacking and sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for one charge of unauthorized access to computer material.
People took to Reddit to share their thoughts on the case, with one user posting: “I think this reveals more about the ineptitude of NCS than the crime that occurred…”
A second added: “As someone who is also in the IT space - it is a pretty shocking security oversight that the ex-employee is still able to gain admin access to NCS servers on what seems to be a PERSONAL laptop.”
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While a third said: “That’s a hell of a grudge.”
NCS might be tempted to tighten up their computer security after they revealed that this breach has cost them a fortune in losses.