A former Cisco employee admitted to gaining unauthorized access to the company's network and wiping 456 virtual machines, as well as causing operational problems for more than 16,000 Webex Teams accounts.
According to the US, Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose after being accused of intentionally gaining access to a company computer without permission and causing damage.
The 30-year-old engineer resigned in April 2018, but chose to access Cisco's Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment about five months after leaving the company to develop code that deleted 456 virtual machines (VMs).
On September 24, 2018, code was released from Ramesh’s Google Cloud Project account, wiping out VMs. As a result, more than 16,000 Webex Teams accounts were disabled for two weeks.
US prosecutors say the company had to pay $1.4 million in employee overtime to repair the damage caused to the system, as well as issue $1 million in refunds to customers affected by the network issues.
“He admitted that he acted recklessly in developing the code and knowingly ignored the substantial risk that his conduct could harm Cisco,” the DoJ says.
The engineer was formally charged on July 13, 2020, and is currently at large. Ramesh faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. His trial is set for December 9, 2020.
In a statement, Cisco said additional safeguards had been implemented and the company was doing its best to address the damage as quickly as possible.
