Spited by Dismissal, Employee Deletes Office Servers Worth Rp11 Billion

The story of revenge by a former employee of a technology company in Singapore has led to criminal proceedings after he boldly deleted hundreds of virtual servers belonging to his former employer. The action caused the company to suffer losses amounting to Rp11 billion.

The individual is Kandula Nagaraju (39), a former employee of the Singapore-based information technology company National Computer Systems (NCS). Nagaraju was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison after being proven to have performed illegal access to the company’s computer systems and deleted 180 virtual servers belonging to NCS.

According to reports, Kandula’s contract with NCS was terminated in October 2022 due to poor performance. He last worked on 16 November 2022. Court documents reveal that Kandula felt confused and resentful upon his dismissal, as he believed he had performed well and contributed significantly to NCS during his tenure. Following his departure from NCS, he was left without employment in Singapore and had to return to India.

From approximately November 2021 to October 2022, Kandula was part of a 20-person team managing the Quality Assurance (QA) computer systems at NCS. NCS is a company providing information, communication, and technology services. The systems managed by Kandula’s former team were used to test software and new programmes before their launch.

In a statement to CNA, NCS clarified that this was a ‘self-contained testing system’ consisting of approximately 180 virtual servers, and no sensitive information was stored within them.

After his contract was terminated and upon his return to India, Kandula used his laptop to gain illegal access to the system using administrator login credentials. He performed this action six times between 6 January and 17 January 2023. In February of that year, Kandula returned to Singapore while searching for new employment. He rented a room with a former colleague from NCS and used his own Wi-Fi network to access the NCS system once on 23 February 2023.

During the period of unauthorised access over those two months, he wrote several computer scripts to test whether they could be used on the system to delete servers. In March 2023, he accessed the NCS QA system 13 times. On 18 and 19 March, he executed scripts programmed to delete the 180 virtual servers in the system. The scripts were written to delete the servers one by one.

The following day, the NCS team realised the system was inaccessible and attempted to resolve the issue, but were unsuccessful. They discovered that the servers had been deleted.

On 11 April 2023, a police report was filed, and several IP addresses identified through an internal investigation were handed over to the police. Kandula’s laptop was seized by the police, and the scripts used to perform the deletion were found. Investigations revealed that he had searched Google for scripts to delete virtual servers, which he then used to encode his own scripts. As a result of his actions, NCS incurred losses of S$917,832.