A former Cisco employee could face 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine due to damaging Cisco’s network
The US Attorney’s Office and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have jointly announced that the former Cisco employee who damaged Cisco’s network and ran away has pleaded guilty in the San Jose court.
After this former Cisco employee left his job, he illegally invaded the Cisco cloud computing system and deployed malicious code, resulting in the deletion of some of Cisco’s enterprise terminal business virtual machines.
Of course, this case also highlights the chaos of Cisco’s internal management. The permission of the employee who has left was not removed so that the employee can continue to log in to its cloud system.
The database deletion incident affected a large number of Cisco WebEx Teams enterprise users. Cisco spent millions of dollars to repair data and refunded millions of dollars to customers.
The report said that court documents showed that the employee’s account permissions were not deleted five months after leaving Cisco, so he was able to log in to the Cisco system with his own permissions.
It was not until a large number of virtual machines were deleted that caused the service to be abnormal, and Cisco conducted an investigation and found that the system management authority of the former employee had not been removed.
Although the incident did not cause the leakage of Cisco’s customer data, it still caused huge losses to Cisco. Therefore, Cisco decisively called the police and captured the former employee.
At present, the former employee has admitted that he deployed the code to delete the virtual machine, and the employee will face trial in the San Jose Federal Court.
According to the prosecutor’s charge of deliberately unauthorized access to protected computers and causing damage, the employee faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
