Indian techie jailed in Singapore for hacking into servers of company that fired him

An Indian national has been sentenced to two years and eight months in jail for accessing his former employer’s computer systems without authorisation and deleting cyber material that caused the company a loss of around SGD 918,000 (approx. Rs 5.6 crore).

39-year-old Kandula Nagaraju was employed with Singapore’s National Computer Systems (NCS) from where he was fired in October 2022 for poor work performance.

Kandula felt “upset” and “confused” by his termination and used his administrator login credentials to gain unauthorised access to NCS’ quality assurance (QA) computer system on multiple occasions between January 6 and January 17, 2023, Channel News Asia reported, citing court documents.

Later, between March 18 and 19, 2023, he executed a programmed script that systematically deleted 180 virtual servers from within NCS’ systems.

This QA system was used to test new software and programs, and although it contained no sensitive information, the deletion caused significant disruption.

NCS discovered the issue on March 20, 2023, when the system became inaccessible.

Internal investigations led to the identification of several IP addresses, and a police report was filed on April 11, 2023.

Kandula’s laptop, which contained the script used for the deletions, was seized by the police.

Investigations revealed that Kandula had searched for and used Google scripts to code his deletion script.