Please store this in the ‘I’ve been kicking myself since I’ve read it for not thinking of it myself’ drawer of your mind.
An unnamed man from the United States that worked as a programmer at a normal 9-5 office job was fired after having been found to subcontract his work to a Chinese company for several years.
The company’s IT subcontractor (Verizon) started an inquiry after finding a mysterious secure VPN connection to the company’s servers, since it was coming from China they strongly suspected some industrial espionage was going on. To their surprise however, they found no evidence of such shenanigans. Instead they’ve found that one of the company’s employees had sent his Secure RSA Token ID by FedEx to China, to allow the subcontractor to log in and work in his place every day.
Instead, our office worker spent his days browsing the web. A forensic analysis of his workplace PC unearthed his typical browsing habits which included Reddit, eBay and perhaps WeInterrupt¹.
More incredible is that the man was considered as one of the company’s better software developers and regularly received praise for his work!
The man, who earned a six-digit salary for his work, was found to have turned over about US50.000$ per year to the Chinese subcontractor.
¹Maybe…
