An IT employee was sentenced to over 2 years in prison for causing damage of over €632,000 to his former employer after his dismissal.
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Who are the people involved? NCS Group is a Singapore-based IT company that provides various services and has over 13,000 employees worldwide.
One of these employees was 39-year-old Kandula Nagaraju, who, according to ChanneNewsAsia (CNA), was part of a 20-person team responsible for quality assurance of computer systems at NCS from November 2021 to October 2022. The team’s job, according to CNA, was to test new software before it was released. This system consisted of 180 virtual servers.
However, after just under a year of cooperation, NCS terminated the contract with Nagaraju, but forgot to block his access to the systems.
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Former employee deletes 180 virtual servers
How did the ex-employee cause the damage? According to CNA, several months after his dismissal, Nagaraju repeatedly gained unauthorized access to the NCS system using the admin credentials.
During this time, he also wrote some scripts and tested whether they would run on the system to delete the 180 virtual servers.
According to CNA, Nagaraju then put his revenge plan into action in March 2023 and ran a script in the NCS system that deleted all 180 virtual servers of the system for quality assurance purposes. This caused NCS damage amounting to €632,000.
How did the employee’s revenge end? As CNA reports, NCS filed a report with the Singapore police after realizing that their servers had been deleted.
In addition, according to TomsHardware, the company provided the police with some IP addresses that they discovered during internal investigations. Using these IP addresses, the police were able to determine Nagaraju’s location and confiscate his laptop.
On the laptop, authorities then discovered Nagaraju’s Google search history, in which he searched for scripts to delete virtual servers. They also found the scripts he used to delete the servers.
The competent court subsequently sentenced Nagaraju to two years and eight months in prison.
NCS is not the first company to suffer hundreds of thousands of euros in damages because a former employee was out for revenge. A bank had a similar experience with a fired cloud engineer: A fired employee caused around 200,000 euros in damages because his employer did not immediately take away his company notebook