16k Webex Accounts Deleted By Former Cisco Engineer

Former Cisco Engineer’s action lost 16k Webex accounts, as he accessed Cisco’s AWS accounts and deleted 456 virtual machines,

Sentenced to Prison:

Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, a former Cisco engineer, sentenced to 24 months in prison for accessing Cisco’s network after he left the company without authorization.

Moreover, sentenced for destroying servers that hosted infrastructure for the Cisco Webex Teams service.

However, for reasons not mentioned in the indictment, Ramesh accessed Cisco’s cloud infrastructure hosted on Amazon’s Web Services.

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He then proceeded to run a script that deleted 456 virtual machines that were supporting Cisco’s video conferencing software WebEx Teams

Resulting in the temporary deletion of more than 16,000 Webex accounts.

Although Ramesh apologized for his actions, the former Cisco engineer never explained what drove him to delete Cisco’s servers.

Data Recovery and Refunds:

However, Cisco took two weeks to recover the accounts and rebuild its systems, and restored service to all affected parties.

Costing more than $2.4 million, and $1,000,000 in customer refunds.

Ramesh was fired from his job, serving the next two years in prison starting next year from February 10, and also ordered to pay a $15,000 fine.

Finally, Cisco confirmed that the incident didn’t expose any of its customers’ data.