An IT employee was sentenced to over 2 years in prison for causing damage of €632,000 to his former employer after his dismissal.
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Who are the parties involved? NCS Group is an IT company from Singapore that offers 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-member team at NCS responsible for the quality assurance of computer systems from November 2021 to October 2022. The team’s task, according to CNA, was to test new software before it was released. This system consisted of 180 virtual servers.
However, NCS terminated the contract with Nagaraju after just under a year of collaboration, forgetting to revoke his access to the systems.
Ex-Employee Deletes 180 Virtual Servers
How did the ex-employee cause the damage? According to CNA, Nagaraju unlawfully accessed the NCS system several times using the admin login details months after his dismissal.
During this time, he also wrote some scripts and tested whether they would run on the system to delete the 180 virtual servers.
Nagaraju then executed his revenge plan, according to CNA, in March 2023 by running a script in the NCS system that deleted all 180 virtual servers of the quality assurance system. This caused damage of €632,000 to NCS.
What was the outcome of the revenge for the employee? As reported by CNA, NCS filed a report with the police in Singapore after they noticed that servers were being deleted.
Additionally, the company transmitted some IP addresses to the police, which they discovered during internal investigations, according to TomsHardware. Based on these IP addresses, the police were able to determine Nagaraju’s location and confiscate his laptop.
On the laptop, the authorities discovered Nagaraju’s Google search history, which showed he had searched for scripts to delete virtual servers. Additionally, the scripts he used to delete the servers were found.
The 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 damage because a former employee sought revenge. A bank had a similar experience with a terminated cloud engineer: A fired employee caused around €200,000 in damage because his employer did not directly take away the company laptop.
