A former Cisco engineer hacked into WebEx's systems, crashing 16.000 accounts for two weeks. And no, he is not to blame for the twists and turns 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 access without permission, on Cisco's cloud infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services and entered it on September 24, 2018, five months after he resigned from the company.
According to a press release from the US Department of Justice during his unauthorized access, he developed a code that resulted in deletion 456 virtual machines for Cisco's WebEx Teams application, which provides video meetings, exchange messages video, 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 pleading guilty to intentionally accessing protected computer without authorization. He was further ordered to pay a $15.000 fine and serve one year of supervised release after his release. In addition, Ramesh faces the possibility of deportation to his native India after his conviction.