An Indian national has been sentenced to two years and eight months in jail for accessing his former employer’s computer system without permission and deleting cyber content, causing losses of about Singapore dollars 918,000 (about Rs 5.6 crore) to the company.

Kandula Nagaraju, 39, was employed with the National Computer System (NCS) of Singapore, from where he was fired in October 2022 due to poor work performance.

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

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

This QA system was used to test new software and programs, and although it did not contain any sensitive information, its removal caused significant disruption.

The problem was discovered by NCS on 20 March 2023, when the system became unreachable.

Internal investigation identified several IP addresses and a police report was filed on April 11, 2023.

The police seized Kandula’s laptop, which contained the script used for the deleted messages.

Investigations revealed that Kandula had discovered and used Google Script to code his delete script.