Spite after dismissal, man deletes 180 company servers, causing SGD 917,832 (approximately Rp11 billion) in losses

A former employee of a technology company in Singapore was jailed after deleting 180 virtual servers belonging to his former office a few months after being dismissed. The former employee is known to have worked as a cloud consultant at NCS. He was terminated in October 2022 due to poor job performance. However, his administrative access was not immediately revoked after the termination. According to Channel News Asia, the former employee named Kandula Nagaraju then used the access to illegally re-enter the company’s systems. He is said to have attempted to study system vulnerabilities and test whether his activities could be detected by the company. In February 2023, Nagaraju returned to Singapore and lived with a former colleague who still worked at NCS. He then used that home Wi‑Fi network to mask illegal access to the company’s systems. During that period, he also searched Google for server deletion scripts and developed a program to delete virtual servers one by one. The attack occurred in March 2023. Nagaraju ran the script to delete a total of 180 virtual servers in NCS’s QA environment. Because it was carried out over the weekend, the damage was only discovered the following Monday when the QA team could not access their systems. An internal probe by NCS uncovered suspicious activity from an old administrator account that remained active. The security team traced system access logs and found unauthorised connections coming from the home network of his colleague in Singapore. Digital forensic evidence included the server deletion script, records of illegal system access to NCS, and Google searches related to mass deleting virtual servers. The evidence led to Nagaraju’s confession to investigators. As a result of the incident, NCS incurred losses of around SGD 917,832 (about Rp 11 billion).