Stunning Cybercrime: Fired Indian National Deletes 180 Servers in Retaliation

Indian citizen Kandula Nagaraju got two-and-a-half years in prison for breaking into computers without permission. This caused 180 virtual servers to be deleted, which cost his former company, NCS, SGD 918,000 (USD 678,000). Monday saw the sentence handed, with an extra fee being discussed.

At NCS, Kandula, 39, oversaw the quality assurance system used to test new software as part of a team of twenty. He was let go in October of 2022 for underperforming, and his job ended on November 16, 2022. Distressed by his termination, Kandula went back to India and, using administrator credentials, entered NCS’s system six times between January 6 and January 17, 2023.

Following the landing of a new job, Kandula went to Singapore in February 2023 and on that day used the Wi-Fi of a previous coworker to once more access NCS’s system. During these illicit visits, he created computer scripts to destroy servers.

Kandula logged onto NCS’s QA system thirteen times in March 2023. He ran a script on March 18 and 19 that removed 180 virtual servers. The staff at NCS found the servers unusable the following day and then realized they had been erased.

An April 11, 2023, police report resulted from an internal inquiry. Seized was Kandula’s laptop, which had the deletion code. Additionally discovered were Google searches for server destruction scripts. Kandula caused NCS substantial financial loss by knowing he was not allowed to use the system after termination.