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Just a few lines above what you wrote:

> Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, who worked at Cisco from July 2016 to April 2018, admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors that he had deliberately connected to Cisco's AWS-hosted systems without authorization in September 2018

How does that sound accidental to you?

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It's a plea agreement. It's quite common in the US to admit to crimes you didn't do to secure a plea bargain.

Could just be very risk-averse plea-bargaining on Ramesh's part.

Yep. It may just be a fact that he ran terraform and it said to delete all VM instances, only he forgot he had his old credentials in the environment variables, and who would have ever expected them to work.

That said, the lack of details on this do leave a lot to be imagined - it’s just as easy to read this as revenge, and that large companies don’t bother to publicly shame people most of the time.

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