A man in Singapore was sentenced to jail on Monday (10 June) after hacking into his former company’s computer and deleting 180 virtual servers.
39-year-old Kandula Nagaraju’s actions caused his former company to incur losses of about S$918,000.
He was allegedly “confused and upset” after his contract was terminated due to poor work performance.
According to Channel NewsAsia, Kandula formerly worked for NCS — an information technology company in Singapore.
Source: Google Maps
Between Nov 2021 and Oct 2022, Kandula was part of a 20-member team which oversaw the quality assurance (QA) of a computer system at the company.
The system, which comprised about 180 virtual servers, was used to test new software and programs before being released to the public.
However, Kandula’s work contract was terminated in Oct 2022 due to poor work performance.
He returned to India after failing to secure another job.
CNA reported that Kandula used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to NCS’ computer system on six occasions after arriving back in India.
In February 2023, he returned to Singapore after securing a new job and rented a room with a former NCS colleague.
Kandula subsequently accessed NCS’ system using his Wi-Fi network.
During this time, Kandula wrote computer scripts to test if they could be used to delete the servers on the computer system.
On 18 and 19 March, he ran a programmed script which deleted 180 of NCS’ virtual systems.
Per CNA, NCS realised the servers were deleted a day after Kandula ran his programmed script.
About a month later on 11 April, NCS lodged a police report and handed over multiple IP addresses they discovered from internal investigations.
Police subsequently seized Kandula’s laptop and found the programmed script used to delete NCS’ servers.
Investigations also revealed that he had made Google searches looking for scripts to delete virtual servers before the incident.
On Monday (10 June), Kandula was sentenced to two years and eight months’ jail for one charge of unauthorised access to computer material.
Court documents stated that he felt “confused and upset” when his contract was terminated, alleging he “made good contributions” to NCS.
NCS reported accumulated S$917,832 in losses due to Kandula’s actions.
Also read: S’porean woman jailed for cheating boss of life savings & S$3.7M over nearly 10 years
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Featured image adapted from Google Maps.
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