Security News > 2021 > March > Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

A California federal court has sentenced a "Vengeful" techie to two years in the clink after he deleted 1,200 Microsoft user accounts belonging to a client.

Deepanshu Kher, a Delhi-based employee of an unnamed IT outsourcing firm, was tasked with helping a company in the coastal city of Carlsbad, California, migrate its Office 365 environment.

According to court docs, he was flown into California in 2017 "To assist with the migration." Dissatisfaction with Kher's work led to him being pulled from the project by January 2018, and some months later he was terminated by his employer.

The Department of Justice said that two months after his June 2018 return to India, the 32-year-old decided to exact "Revenge" by breaking into the systems of his former client and deleting as many Office 365 accounts as he could find, nuking 1,200 of a total 1,500.

The DoJ noted the verdict from district court judge Marilyn L Huff, which said Kher had "Perpetrated a significant and sophisticated attack on the company, an attack which was planned and clearly intended as revenge."

In addition to two years of hard porridge, Kher was sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay a $567,084 penalty - the same amount paid by his former client to clean up his mess.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/03/23/outsourced_techie_2_years/