Which was also used repeatedly over the course of 3-4 months to gain access via a non-corporate laptop without the IT doing anything about it.

It’s only hacking if it’s in a CVE.

Anything else is just sparkling unauthorized access.

Technically he was not authorized to use the computer system due to his termination which the law looks at and calls hacking.

He also didn't delete servers

One man IT shop maybe? Usually stuff like that goes through IT, because who in their right mind would give HR modify access to active directory?

I mean kind of depends. I got a soft layoff so worked 6 months more and got 3 months pay for the transfer to India.

I think best practices for highly secure environments is at the time of notice you lock the account and give that person 2 weeks off.

Most normal company’s it’s cool work till your last day, do your exit interview and we lock your account on Friday afternoon or Monday

Also you never want to change someone’s password on termination. What if their login is running some business critical tasks? Not best practices but I can tell you it happens a lot especially for reporting. If you lock the account you can always just reenable it and work to fix the issue

Last year, I tried my admin creds at my old job and it still worked. I was afraid of retaliation so I sent them a message from a throwaway email about changing their passwords.

Probably HR (or the NCS equivalent) never told the right people. I am not saying this is actually what happened, but a lot of IT bemoan the fact they are never told some rando employee was fired because HR neglects to inform them. Sometimes it takes months to discover, and even with a 90 day password/login lockout, some halfway decent admin could get around this by secretly building a back door, and using the messed up communication and politics between departments to hide this. Even in the 1990s, I saw people put in "time bombs" in their code that "if such and such is not updated in 6 months, run destructo-script A."

But imagine someone like Kandula Nagaraju here. Worked in QA, probably did a great jobs with some skills, but had the personality of swallowing broken glass. He was terminated in October 2022 due to "poor work performance," which could mean anything. "Not a team player." Or maybe he really was an idiot: I mean, a smart person would have a conniption, but get employed elsewhere and then slam his former company at parties. "Those NCS folks didn't know what they had with me!" But this guy was probably someone with some anger management issues, probably a jerk, and possibly stupid. He might have had revenge fantasies, and set up a small virtual server posing as a backup code mirror. But outside the audits, it allowed ssh from the outside, and hid it through a knockd daemon. Or maybe only launched ssh at certain hours before shutting it down again. Silently working away in a sea of virtual servers with little to no updated documentation. He gets in, has internal access, and runs a script with admin credentials because they don't rotate their AWS keys/secrets quickly enough. Or didn't even know he was let go.

After Kandula's contract was terminated and he arrived back in India, he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials. He did so on six occasions between Jan 6 and Jan 17, 2023.

That's embarrassing to the company. Not only did he get in, but SIX TIMES after he was let go. he probably knew what order to run the delete commands (like, say, an aws "terminate-instances" cli command from a primary node), and did so one by one, probably during hours with the least amount of supervision, where the first few alerts would take hours to get someone in the monitoring chain to wake an admin. Given his last day was in November, and he got back in January, the admins probably thought their 90 access credential rotation was "good enough," but he got in on his 80th day or whatever.

I know this because I have had to do triage when a former contractor did this to a company I worked for. But instead of wiping out instances, he opened a new set of cloud accounts from the master account, put them in an unmonitored region (in this case, Asia), and spun up thousands of instances to run bitcoin mining. Only because AWS notified us of "unusual traffic" were we made aware at all, and this guy knew his shit and covered his tracks very well. He did it at a speed that could have only been automated. Thankfully, AWS did not charge us the seven figure amount that this activity amassed in just three days.

I've had people above me fired in a startup and I was asked by the board of the company to lock their accounts and seize their professional laptops while they were in a meeting informing them they were fired.

The idiots had tried to stage a "coup" against the CEO which failed spectacularly.

If its the NCS (National Computer Systems) that was bought by Pearson a few years ago, then what they sell is the hardware/software that reads all the "fill in the circle with a #2 lead pencil" forms.

I'm going to take a guess this is the guy that removed access from fired people under hr request, for $999.999

I would guess man hours.

Because it's going to take time to put those servers back in production. Depending what they did it might have causing outage to external facing customers, which will have a higher impact than internal facing. But with that amount of money, it actually seems fairly low to me so I'm guessing they weren't public facing servers.

So it was probably the time that it takes to recreate all those servers get everything back up and running, and delayed work caused by the outage.

That's just my guess though

As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.

Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix...

Large companies calculate this value as a "burn rate", which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it's ~$1M in losses.

They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.