Security News > 2020 > August > Ex-Cisco Employee Pleads Guilty to Deleting 16K Webex Teams Accounts

A former Cisco Systems employee pleaded guilty this week to hacking into the networking company's cloud infrastructure and deleting 16,000 Webex Teams accounts in 2018.

Webex Teams is Cisco's collaboration application for enterprises.

"During his unauthorized access, Ramesh admitted that he deployed a code from his Google Cloud Project account that resulted in the deletion of 456 virtual machines for Cisco's WebEx Teams application, which provided video meetings, video messaging, file sharing, and other collaboration tools," according to the Department of Justice in a Wednesday post.

As a result of this incident, the 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts were shut down for up to two weeks, which caused Cisco to spend approximately $1,400,000 to restore the damage to the application and refund over $1,000,000 to affected customers.

No customer data was compromised, according to the DoJ. "Cisco addressed the issue in September 2018 as quickly as possible, ensured no customer information was lost or compromised, and implemented additional safeguards," a Cisco spokesperson told Threatpost.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/ex-cisco-employee-pleads-guilty-to-deleting-16k-webex-teams-accounts/158748/