A 39-year-old Indian man was sacked by a Singaporean corporation after he erased 180 virtual servers. His recent conviction included a more than two-year prison term.
Due to his illegal access to computer files, an Indian national was sentenced to two years and six months in prison. During that time, he erased 180 virtual servers, which cost his employer around SGD 918,000 (USD678,000).
Kandula Nagaraju, 39, was “upset” to be sacked by NCS in October 2022 for subpar work performance, and his employment ended on November 16, 2022. This was one of the charges that was considered for his sentencing.
Kandula managed the quality assurance (QA) computer system at NCS, a provider of information communication and technology services, as a member of a 20-person team from November 2021 to October 2022.
Before being released, new software and programmes were tested on the system that Kandula’s previous team was in charge of. About 180 virtual servers made up the system, and none of the servers held any sensitive data. Kandula felt he had “made good contributions” to NCS throughout his job and had performed well, so he felt “confused and upset” when he was sacked, according to court documents, Channel News Asia reported.
He didn’t have a job in Singapore after NCS fired him, so he went back to India and used his laptop to log in as an administrator and access the system without authorization. In the six days between January 6 and January 17 of last year, he did this. Kandula found a new job and returned to Singapore in February of that year. On February 23, 2023, he shared a room with a former NCS coworker and accessed NCS’s system once via his Wi-Fi network.
The individual produced some computer programmes during the two months of unauthorised access to see if they could be utilised to erase the servers from the system.
He made 13 visits to NCS’s QA system in March 2023. He executed a pre-written script on March 18 and 19, wiping out 180 virtual servers from the system. He wrote his script intending to erase each server individually.
The NCS team discovered the system was down the next day and attempted to fix but to no effect. The servers had been erased, they found out.
A police report was filed on April 11, 2023, and the police received various IP addresses that were discovered during internal investigations.
