Facepalm: A former National Computer Systems (NCS) employee has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison after being found guilty of unauthorized access to computer material. If you're looking for a blueprint on how to wreck your IT career and earn a few years behind bars, read on.
NCS terminated the contract of 39-year-old Kandula Nagaraju in October of 2022, reportedly due to subpar job performance. Nagaraju had worked as a quality assurance specialist, using test servers to vet applications prior to their release to customers and end users.
Court documents noted Nagaraju felt confused and upset over the termination, as he believed he had made "good contributions" to NCS during his time with the company.
Not long after returning home from Singapore, Nagaraju realized that his login credentials for his former employer were still active. In early 2023, he devised a plan to get revenge on NCS. Nagaraju found delete scripts online and tweaked them to run on NCS test servers.
The disgruntled ex-employee deployed the script, which was designed to delete servers one at a time, over the weekend of March 18-19. By the time NCS employees got to the office the following Monday, all 180 of the company's test servers had fallen.
According to NCS, the incident cost the company around $678,000 to straighten out. Fortunately for the business, no sensitive customer or company information was stored on the test servers.
NCS reported the incident to police in April 2023, and it did not take long for authorities to track down Nagaraju. On his seized laptop, police found the script used in the attack and even search history relating to using delete scripts on virtual servers.
NCS said human oversight was to blame for Nagaraju's credentials remaining active after he was served his walking papers. Once the unauthorized access was discovered, the credentials were immediately blocked but of course, the damage had already been done.
Nagaraju was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.
Image credit: Pixabay, Ooi Boon Keong