Disgruntled techie blacked out airport, CBI files chargesheet

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday filed a chargesheet against an engineer for allegedly disrupting two key cyber networks that handled passenger processing and baggage retrieval systems at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport on June 29 last year.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday filed a chargesheet against an engineer for allegedly disrupting two key cyber networks that handled passenger processing and baggage retrieval systems at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport on June 29 last year.

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The accused, Gurucharan Kaluraya, is a former employee of a Gurgaon-based private firm that used to maintain the primary and back up servers for the airport's common use passenger processing system (CUPPS) and baggage reconciliation system (BRS) at Terminal 3.

Kaluraya, allegedly due to a grudge against his former employer, had introduced a malicious script into the primary and back-up servers which rendered the CUPPS and BRS non-functional for around 12 hours — 2:56am to 14.56pm — on June 29 last year.

A Bangalore resident, Kalluraya was charged under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act, 2000 in a Delhi court.

"The engineer was a disgruntled employee as he felt that the Gurgaon firm had not acknowledged his contributions in preparing the CUPPS and BRS systems for it," said a CBI source.

The source added, "When we confronted him, he immediately admitted to having introduced the malicious software that resulted in the outage at the airport out of grudge against his former employer."