Security News > 2020 > December > Ex-Cisco engineer who nuked 16k WebEx accounts goes to prison
Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, a former Cisco engineer, was sentenced on Wednesday to two years in prison and ordered to pay a $15,000 fine for shutting down more than 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts and over 450 virtual machines in 2018,.
"[D]uring his unauthorized access 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 provides video meetings, video messaging, file sharing, and other collaboration tools," a Department of Justice press release says.
As a direct result of his activity, over 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts had to be shut down for roughly two weeks which resulted in Cisco having to spend around $2,400,000 in customer refunds and employee time for restoring the damage caused by Ramesh.
"Cisco addressed the issue in September 2018 as quickly as possible, ensured no customer information was lost or compromised, and implemented additional safeguards," Cisco said in a statement.
Ramesh received a sentence of 24 months in prison after being found guilty of a count of Intentionally Accessing a Protected Computer Without Authorization and Recklessly Causing Damage.