Delhi, Mar 24: A young IT engineer was assigned to a project for a California-based client. (Suppose you want to build a website and you give the order to an IT company to do that for you. You are now the client, and that IT company is your vendor. A client is someone who gives work, and the vendor is the person who does that work for money. These terms can be used for law, IT, and almost any kind of contract- based work).
The project was to help a company create accounts on Microsoft 365 for its employees. Microsoft 365 service helps employees use their email, access the company network, sign in, use Office software, and in general, perform their day-to-day work on the computer.
The client was not happy with the IT professional’s work. So, in May 2018, he was fired from his job. In June 2018, he returned to India. A little later, he accessed the company’s network and deleted their Microsoft accounts.
He deleted over 80% of the accounts of the company – almost 1200 out of 1500 accounts were completely wiped out. This means that the company lost the data of these users, and 80% of the employees could not work! The company was completely paralysed for two days. IT issues went on for another 3 months. At some point, the FBI was informed. The FBI is a central investigation unit in USA. It is like the CBI in India.
On January 11th , 2021, the IT professional was flying to USA when he was arrested. He did not know that there was an arrest warrant against him in the US.
He was produced in court and found guilty. He was sentenced to 2 years in jail, 3 years of supervised release, and needs to pay 567,084 dollars – the bill his client’s company had to pay to get their operations back on track. (Sentence: The punishment given by a judge in a court of law).