NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 16- A Senior analytic manager at Safaricom was on Tuesday charged with demanding over Sh80 million by menace, from the telecommunications provider.
By menace means issuing a threat or a declaration of an intention to cause harm to a person.
Allak Sai Kumar is said to have committed the offence while working from home, in collaboration with others, who were in court on Tuesday.
The crime according to the court documents seen by Shahidi News was committed between November 1 and 3, 2021.
The data analytic also faced another count of unlawful disclosure of personal data, in a manner “incompatible with the purpose for which the data was collected to a third party on the same dates.”
Kumar is further accused that “with dishonest intent and in breach of his terms of employment, he processed confidential Safaricom customers data and uploaded to a web server cloud a count held by amazon web services (AWS).”
The prosecution told the court that Kumar has been an employee of the firm since October 2020.
During the period, he has been working as a senior manager analytic.
It is with the nature of his job, the court heard, that he had the right of access to customer data at Safaricom servers since he is after all a data scientist.
Preliminary investigations led detectives to him.
The probe linked him to the upload of data at the Amazon Web Services and as the person who visited AWS Amazon.
Reportedly the accused had admitted to the police that he has an account with Amazon though what he had uploaded was dummy data.
Police further said that the suspect immediately after the leak was known, Kumar lied to his seniors that he had been assigned to be part of the investigations following the breach.
He denied the charges before Milimani chief magistrate Wendy Micheni and pleaded for lenient bond terms.
He was released on a cash bail of Sh300,000 or a bond of Sh500,000.
He was also ordered to deposit his passport in court as he was a flight risk.
The case will be mentioned on November 30.
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