Cisco: former engineer accesses network and blocks 16,000 Webex accounts

Several million damages for Cisco

The 30-year-old engineer resigned in April 2018, but chose to access Cisco's Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment about five months after leaving the company to deploy code that removed 456 virtual machines (VM).

On September 24, 2018, the code was launched from the engineer's Google Cloud Project account, wiping out VMs. As a result of this action, over 16,000 Webex Teams accounts were disabled for two weeks.

According to US prosecutors, the action cost Cisco $ 1.4 million in additional labor time to restore and repair damage to the system. In addition, there is reimbursement of approximately $ 1 million to customers affected by these network problems voice engineer.

The US Department of Justice specifies that he "admitted to having acted irresponsibly in deploying the code, and to have consciously ignored the substantial risk that his conduct could harm Cisco".

It appears that no customer data has been compromised.

Partnership with law enforcement

The engineer was formally charged on July 13, 2020 and is currently out on bail. Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh faces up to five years in prison, and a fine of up to $ 250,000. The sentence was set for December 9, 2020.

Cisco said additional warranties were in place and the company dealt with the damage as quickly as possible.

"We have brought this matter directly to the attention of law enforcement and we appreciate their partnership in bringing this person to justice," notes Cisco. “We are convinced that the processes put in place can prevent this from happening again."

In the news, as a reminder, Cisco acquired BabbleLabs last week , with the objective of improving the sound environment in its teleconferencing tools, and in particular Webex meetings, at a time when remote work has become essential to many businesses.