Layoffs are always traumatic. For this reason, certain measures must be taken during dismissal to avoid incidents such as those that happened when a software company based in Singapore dismissed one of its IT professionals.
The company fired the employee, but did not revoke his access permissions to its servers. In retaliation, the employee removed 180 virtual servers on which the company was testing his software, causing damage valued at more than $680,000.
Fired for poor performance. The story begins when NCS, a computer, communication and technology services company located in Singapore, fired 39-year-old Kandula Nagaraju in October 2022, one of the software engineers who was in charge of testing the programs that the company offered to Your clients.
The company’s argument for firing Nagaraju was poor performance. According to local sources published in Channel News Asiathe employee felt “confused and upset” with the decision because he felt he “had made good contributions to the company” during the year he had been working for NCS.
Nagaraju’s employment. The dismissed employee was part of a team of 20 people that managed NCS’ quality control IT system. The job consisted of managing a virtual space in which the programs and services that NCS offered to its clients were executed.
A kind of ‘Sandbox’ in which programs were tested to detect errors and polish their development before selling them to other companies. This virtual environment consisted of 180 servers in which business software and network environments were emulated to test their programs with maximum fidelity, but no confidential company information was stored there.
Revenge is served cold. Faced with the prospect of being unemployed, Kandula Nagaraju returned to India, her country of origin. From there, he used her laptop to access NCS servers on up to six occasions during the month of January 2023.
In February 2023, the former employee returned to Singapore to work at another company. He took advantage of the contact with his former colleagues to share a flat with one of them. He used his WiFi to reconnect to the NCS servers from his laptop over the next three months. During that time, the computer scientist used Google to search for fragments of scripts to create a custom one that would fulfill his purpose: eliminate the 180 NCS virtual servers one by one.
Verdict: prison for dismissal. The company initiated an internal investigation of the incident and discovered unauthorized access by Kandula Nagaraju. With the IP addresses in hand, the company filed a complaint with the court demanding 917,832 Singapore dollars (about 858,500 euros).
The police seized Nagaraju’s laptop where they not only verified the coincidence of the IPs that had been detected, but also found the code that had caused the company’s virtual servers to be deleted. A court ruling has sentenced the former employee to two years and eight months in prison for the damage caused and the unauthorized access to the company network. For this employee, the dismissal has paid off.
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Image | Unsplash (ThisisEngineering)
