Security News > 2020 > August > Former Employee Admits Hacking, Damaging Cisco Systems
A former Cisco employee has pleaded guilty to hacking charges related to him accessing the networking giant's systems and causing damage.
A few months after he resigned from the company, he gained unauthorized access to Cisco's AWS cloud infrastructure and deployed code that caused over 450 virtual machines associated with the Cisco Webex Teams application to be deleted.
Deleting the VMs resulted in more than 16,000 Webex Teams accounts being shut down for up to two weeks.
Cisco spent roughly $1.4 million in employee time to respond to the incident and it had to refund over $1 million to impacted customers, authorities said.
At the time of the incident, many Webex users complained about the outage, but Cisco did not provide any information on its cause and there was no indication that it was the result of external activity.