An Indian national who previously worked in Singapore at IT services company National Computer Systems (NCS) has been jailed for deleting all 180 test reports. servers with scripts he found on Google and then ‘perfected’.
The story (via Tom’s hardware) says Kandula Nagaraju, 39, disagreed with his dismissal due to poor performance of NCS’s Quality Assurance (QA) department, which was involved in testing new apps, and took advantage of his colleagues and superiors left his access details active to remotely wipe servers, a plan that came to fruition from January to March 2023.
The affected servers, NCS says, were intended for internal app testing so that no sensitive customer data was lost in the attack. Tom’s hardware wrote that restoring the servers cost about S$678,000, but did not provide specific details on how this was done.
Access credentials and data loss
If we had to guess, the sheer amount of data lost during the attack (and the time Nagaraju spent tightening and testing the scripts) meant that data recovery software probably wouldn’t make it. Perhaps some consultants charging eye-watering fees would have done just that disk images for the servers lying around.
By the way, it looks a bit like a movie Toms tells it: The QA team discovered that all their test servers had been wiped in one morning on March 20, 2023.
Although Nagaraju managed to evade detection as he continued to misuse his credentials and destroy servers, he is not an evil genius: Singaporean police managed to track him down through IP addresses provided to them by his former employer, his shutdown laptop and find the offending scripts.
Apparently he couldn’t even be bothered to remove his browser history, which gave him rights because he picked them up from the internet.
Speak with Channel News Asia (CNA), an NCS spokesperson claimed that Nagaraju’s credentials remained active due to “human oversight.”
That’s all well and good, but you’d think an IT company would keep a closer eye on servers that are essential to the operation of an entire department, especially when CNA also reported that NCS suffered a total loss of S$917,832 thanks to their rogue ex-cops. colleague.
But it’s not all bad. Once Nagaraju gets out of prison, he likely has a bright future ahead of him in the field of vulnerability testing.