Former employee sentenced to over two years in jail for $1-million scheme
A disgruntled employee has been sentenced to over two years of jail time after he accessed and deleted the virtual servers of his former employer who terminated him, according to reports.
Kandula Nagaraju, 39, was part of a 20-member team managing the quality assurance computer system at NCS, Channel News Asia reported.
He was fired, however, in October 2022 due to poor work performance and had to return to India after not finding another job.
Court documents cited by the CNA revealed Kandula felt "confused and upset" when he was sacked, as he was under the belief that he had performed well and "made good contributions" to the organisation.
According to the CNA report, Kandula unlawfully accessed the NCS system numerous times using his laptop in January when he returned to India.
He also accessed it once when he returned to Singapore in February after finding a new job. According to the report, he rented a room with a former NCS colleague and used his Wi-Fi network to enter the system.
The report said Kandula wrote computer scripts between those two months to test if they could be used on the system to delete the servers.
By March, he accessed the NCS system 13 more times, where he ran a programmed script to delete 180 virtual servers in the system.
The NCS said the entire situation cost them about S$917,832 but assured that no sensitive information was stored on the servers.
An internal investigation found Kandula to be behind the scheme, with the police seizing a laptop that contained the scripts he used for deleting the systems.
He was charged of unauthorised access to computer material and was sentenced to two years and eight months of jail time last week.
