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Kandula Nagaraju, a 39-year-old Indian national who worked for NCS (National Computer Systems) in Singapore, was jailed for two years and eight months after a court found him guilty of unauthorized access to computers. According to CNA, Kandula accessed his former employer's systems for several months after his dismissal. He “amused himself” by deleting the company's test servers. Overnight, he deployed scripts that led to the complete removal of all 180 servers.
NCS — a large company headquartered in Singapore that provides IT services in Southeast Asia. It is also present in Australia, Hong Kong, China and India and has more than 13 thousand employees. Kandula Nagaraju worked in a computer quality assurance system where he and his team used test servers to run programs before they were deployed to clients.
Kandula's contract was terminated in October 2022, allegedly due to poor performance. He was embarrassed and upset about being fired because he thought he was doing a good job in his position. After this, he could not find another job in Singapore, so he left the state and returned to his country.
Kandula discovered that his credentials were still active and he had access to the servers. Between January and March 2023, he hatched a plan to take revenge on his former employer. During this time, he searched Google for server removal scripts and eventually began testing them on NCS servers.
None of his former team members realized this, allowing him to access the system more than 13 times in March 2023 alone. It was during this time that he perfected and hid the scripts. Finally, on March 18 and 19, he activated the removal of servers one at a time so as not to arouse suspicion. When the NCS QA team logged in on March 20th, they discovered that their test servers were unavailable.
NCS says the test servers were standalone systems that were used for new applications. It was also said that no confidential information was stored on them, so company and customer data remained safe. However, correcting the situation cost the company approximately $678,000.
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The company reported the incident to the police in April 2023. After Kandula returned to Singapore in February 2023, police tracked his location using IP addresses provided by the company and seized his laptop. That's when they found the scripts he used on the NCS servers, as well as his Google search history.
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