Deepanshu Kher has been sentenced to two years in prison after hacking into the network of a Carlsbad, California-based firm. The former IT contractor worked for the IT consultancy firm for around 1 year in 2017, helping a client with migration to a Microsoft 365 Office environment. The client was not satisfied with Kher’s work, who was fired once this feedback reached the head office. Two months after returning to India, Kher took revenge on his former company, by infiltrating the firm’s servers and deleting over 80% of the employee accounts. Out of 1,500 Microsoft accounts, 1,200 were wiped.
Staff members were unable to access their emails, contacts, calendars, stored documents and Microsoft Teams, leaving them unable to do their work. The company ground to a halt for two days, and IT issues persisted for three months following the hack
