Former Cisco engineer closes 16.000 WebEx accounts sentenced to prison

A former Cisco engineer illegally hacked into WebEx systems, dropping 16.000 accounts in two weeks. And no, it's not his fault for the wrong and upside down in Greek distance education.

Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, a former Cisco engineer, was sentenced on Wednesday 9/12/2020 to two years in prison and a $ 15.000 fine for closing more than 16.000 WebEx Teams accounts and more than 450 virtual machines in 2018.

The 30-year-old had unauthorized access to the Cisco cloud infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services and entered it on September 24, 2018, five months after resigning from the company.

According to a press release from the US Department of Justice During its unauthorized access, it developed a code that resulted in the deletion of 456 virtual machines for Cisco WebEx Teams, which provides video meetings, video messaging, file sharing, and other collaboration tools.

As a direct result of its operation, more than 16.000 WebEx Teams accounts were closed for about two weeks, with Cisco having to spend approximately $ 2.400.000 in cash and employee time to repair the damage caused by Ramesh. However, no customer data was compromised due to his malicious behavior.

Ramesh acknowledged his reckless actions in his apology and said he had deliberately ignored the significant risk and damage that deleting virtual machines from Cisco systems would cause.

Ramesh was sentenced to 24 months in prison after he was found guilty of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization. He was further sentenced to pay a $ 15.000 fine and serve a year under supervision after his release from prison. In addition, Ramesh faces deportation to his native India after his conviction.