Former Cisco Engineer Receives Two Years in Jail for Deleting 16,000 Webex Accounts

About two years ago, 16,000 accounts suddenly disappeared from the Cisco Webex video conferencing service. Cisco was suspected of malicious intent and was not mistaken. A police investigation revealed that the data had been deleted by a previously fired company engineer. The reasons for his action remained unknown even after the trial and sentencing.

According to court documents, 31-year-old Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh from San Jose worked at Cisco from July 2016 to April 2018, after which he quit and moved to another company. Five months later, Ramesh gained access to Cisco's cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. The attacker used a script to delete 456 virtual machines, resulting in the loss of 16,000 Webex accounts.

It took Cisco and its employees two weeks to recover the data. The damage from interference with the service was estimated at $ 2.4 million, of which $ 1 million was spent on compensation for injured customers, and $ 1.4 million - to pay the company's engineers who took part in data recovery.

In July of this year, Ramesh was charged with a crime, and in August he pleaded guilty and apologized. The motives for the misconduct, however, were never announced. He will begin serving his prison term from February next year and, in addition to two years behind bars, must pay a fine of $ 15 thousand.

According to Cisco, customer data was not disclosed as a result of the incident.

Source: ZDNet