On Monday (10 June) Kandula Nagaraju, 39, was sentenced to two years and six months’ jail for unauthorised access to computer material after he hacked into his former employer, NCS’ computer systems and deleted 180 virtual servers.
Nagaraju, who was part of a 20-member team managing the quality assurance (QA) computer system at NCS, had his contract terminated in October 2022 due to poor work performance.
SUFFERED S$917,832 LOSS
Feeling upset and confused about being fired, he gained unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials on multiple occasions between January and February 2023, according to CNA.
As per the report, Kandula was feeling “confused and upset” after being fired, as he believed he had done well and made valuable contributions to NCS during his time employed there.
NCS provides services in the field of information communication and technology.
Kandula’s access to the system without authorization occurred on multiple occasions between January 6 and January 17, 2023, after his contract was terminated and he returned to India.
He repeated the unauthorized access once on February 23, 2023, after moving back to Singapore and renting a room with a former colleague from NCS. During these incidents, he also created computer scripts to test their capability to delete servers within the system.
He was living with a former colleague & managed to write computer scripts to delete the servers from the system. He ran a programmed script to delete the servers one by one on March 18 and 19, which ultimately resulted in the loss of S$917,832 for NCS.
In March 2023, he logged into NCS’ QA system 13 times.
On March 18th and 19th, he utilized a programmed script to remove 180 virtual servers from the system. The script was designed to delete the servers individually. The company only realized the servers had been deleted when they found the system to be inaccessible the following day.
Internal investigations led to a police report being filed in April 2023, which ultimately resulted in the seizure of Nagaraju’s laptop and the discovery of the script used for the deletions.
Nagaraju had searched for scripts to delete virtual servers on Google and used this information to code the script despite being aware that he was not authorised to access the system after his employment ended, the report added.
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