The employee was sentenced to two years of imprisonment.
A former IT consultant hacked a company in Carlsbad, California, and deleted almost all its Microsoft Office 365 accounts in an act of revenge for which he gets two years of prison time.
More than 1,200 user accounts were removed due to his actions which resulted in complete shutdown of the company’s operations for two days.
Deepanshu Kher who was working for an IT consulting firm was sent him to a client to help with migrating to Microsoft Office 365 services.
Following customer complaints, his employer removed him from the task in January 2018 and dismissed him in early May.
Kher kept a grudge towards his employer and after he returned to his native country, India, on August 8, he hacked into the Carlsbad company and deleted over 1,200 of the 1,500 Microsoft Office 365 accounts present in the environment.
So, all the employees lost access to services such as email, contact lists, meeting calendars, documents, video and audio conferences for them to do the job.
All the customers, vendors and consumers were unable to contact the company employees. Also, the employees could not contact them or inform them about what had happened and when operations would get back to normal.
The Carlsbad company had to deal with the resulting issues for almost three months and incurred costs upwards of $560,000.
Kher took a trip to US last year end and he was taken into custody on January 11, unaware of the outstanding arrest warrant.
U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Huff sentenced Kher to two years in prison, three years of supervised release, and paying $567,084 to the Carlsbad company he had sabotaged. The sum represents the bills the victim had to pay in order to recover from the damage.
