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A 49-year-old Dublin man was sentenced Thursday to 18 months in federal prison after admitting last year that he damaged computers belonging to a health insurance company where he previously worked.
Vamsikrishna Naganathanahalli pleaded guilty on Aug. 15 to three counts of knowingly causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causing damage without authorization to a protected computer, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
Based on his plea agreement, Naganathanahalli worked for MedAmerica Inc., part of the Vituity group of companies, from October 2018 to June 2022. He worked as a “senior architect” for Vituity’s Oracle Human Capital Management platform, which contained records for current and past Vituity employees, including their Social Security numbers, salaries, and addresses.
Naganathanahalli confessed that on May 28, 2022, the day he learned that he was being fired from Vituity, he used his access to a privileged account to change the password for another employee’s privileged account without authorization.
On or about Sept. 6, 2022, after his employment had ended, he used that privileged account to change the password for a Vituity contractor. He then used the contractor’s account to load files containing “dummy” or “masked” data, which replaced real data, to the Vituity platform.
Based on Naganathanahalli’s admission, the generic masked data overwrote the real data for approximately 90 percent of Vituity’s approximately 7,000 current and former employees.
Federal prosecutors said this caused a loss to Vituity of at least $400,930.
Besides his prison sentence, Naganathanahalli was ordered to pay $400,930 in restitution and a $300 special assessment and sentenced him to a three-year period of supervised release.
He will begin serving his sentence on July 20, prosecutors said.
