Former Cisco Employee Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh Sentenced to Prison for Damaging Cisco’s Network
December 9, 2020 - San Jose, CA Indian IT professional and a former Cisco employee Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh (31) was sentenced on Wednesday December 9, 2020 to 24 months intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization and causing damage.
Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh was charged with one count of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization and recklessly causing damage, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030(a)(5)(B) and (c)(4)(A)(i)(I) on July 13, 2020.
The intrusion according to court documents, resulted in deletion of 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts in fall 2018.
And, Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh who worked for Cisco and resigned around April 2018, pleaded guilty on August 26, 2020.
According to the plea agreement:
Ramesh admitted to intentionally accessing the Cisco Systems cloud infrastructure that was hosted by Amazon Web Services without Cisco’s permission on September 24, 2018. Ramesh further admitted that during his unauthorized access he deployed a code from his Google Cloud Project account that resulted in the deletion of 456 virtual machines for Cisco’s WebEx Teams application, which provides video meetings, video messaging, file sharing, and other collaboration tools. He admitted that he acted recklessly in deploying the code and consciously disregarded the substantial risk that his conduct would harm Cisco. As a result of Ramesh’s conduct, over 16,000 WebEx Teams accounts were shut down for up to two weeks and caused Cisco to spend approximately $1,400,000 in employee time to restore the damage to the application and refund over $1,000,000 to affected customers. No customer data was compromised as a result of the defendant’s conduct.Besides the 24 months prison time, the court sentenced Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh to one year of supervised release and ordered him to pay a fine of $15,000.
San Jose Indian IT professional Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh is currently out of custody and will begin serving the sentence on February 10, 2021.