Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, a former employee of Cisco has been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in the US, and been asked to pay a fine of US$ 15,000 for accessing Cisco’s network without permission, after he had quit the Company.
The accused, who is of Indian origin, worked with Cisco for about three years, as an engineer, before he resigned and moved to Stitch Fix, a lifestyle platform, in 2018. Later, he accessed Cisco’s servers and ran a script resulting in over 16,000 Cisco Webex accounts and 456 virtual machines getting temporarily deleted.
The Company sensed that it wasn’t any server anomaly that had caused the deletion and sought the help of law enforcement to get to the root of the matter and found out that Ramesh had hacked the system.
Apparently, it took Cisco more than 15 days to recover the accounts and restore the systems. The recovery process also cost the Company about US$ 2.4 million. These virtual machines lent support to Cisco’s video-conferencing software, WebEx Teams. However, according to Cisco, no data related to customers was exposed and services and the Company had managed to restore services satisfactorily.
The accused, who was charged in July this year, was apologetic about what he did and pleaded guilty a month later. He will start his jail term in February, next year.
