An ex-Cisco employee pleaded guilty to causing damage to the tech giant's network which shut down over 16,000 Webex Teams accounts

• An ex-Cisco employee pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the tech giant's network and causing damage that shut down over 16,000 Webex Teams accounts.
• Sudish Kasaba Ramesh pleaded guilty in a federal court in San Jose to breaking into Cisco's cloud network and deploying a code that deleted software that ran the company's popular video conferencing platform, the US Attorney's Office and the FBI said Wednesday.
• Cisco had to spend $1.4 million in employee hours to fix the network, and had to pay more than $1 million to affected customers, the federal agencies said.

A former Cisco employee has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the tech giant's network and causing damage that shut down thousands of Webex Team accounts.

Sudish Kasaba Ramesh pleaded guilty in a federal court in San Jose to breaking into Cisco's cloud network and deploying a code that deleted software that ran Cisco's popular video conferencing platform, the US Attorney's Office and the FBI said Wednesday.

Ramesh illegally broke into the Cisco network in September 2018, five months after he resigned from the company in April.

Ramesh "admitted that he acted recklessly in deploying the code, and consciously disregarded the substantial risk that his conduct could [do] to Cisco," the federal agencies said in a statement.

His actions caused more than 16,000 Webex Teams accounts to be shut down for up to two weeks, the federal agencies said. Cisco had to spend $1.4 million in employee hours to fix the network, and had to pay more than $1 million to affected customers.

The FBI and the US Attorney's Office said no customer data was compromised in the break-in. Rameshis is currently out on bail. A sentencing hearing will be held in December.

In a statement, Cisco said it "addressed the issue as quickly as possible, ensured no customer information was compromised, and implemented additional safeguards. We brought this issue directly to law enforcement and appreciate their partnership in bringing this person to justice. We are confident processes are in place to prevent a recurrence."

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