Patel was an employee in Massachusetts-based Allegro MicroSystems
An Indian American programmer has been accused of hacking into his former company’s computer network and putting a malicious computer programming code.
Shrewsbury-based Nimesh Patel is charged for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespassing and conversion, the Telegram & Gazette reported.
Patel was an employee in Massachusetts-based Allegro MicroSystems’s information technology department from August 26, 2002 to January 8, 2016. He had system administrator privileges on the company’s network and also had access to a computer file containing company password files.
When Patel resigned from the company, he only returned one of the two company laptops he was allotted. Later, when company asked about the second laptop, he returned an older lap instead of the one provided by the company after cleaning the operating system installed on it, according to the court documents.
Patel, who allegedly used another employee’s password, then accessed the company’s network and uploaded a malicious Oracle programming code to Allegro’s finance module.
He also designed a ‘time bomb’ feature that enables the malicious code to run on April 1, 2016, the first week of the company’s new fiscal year, to cause maximum damage.
The company discovered the malicious code on April 24, 2016. A thorough one year investigation found Patel’s unauthorized remote logs and identified him as the culprit.
Patel’s activities cost the company more than $100,000.