Verizon catches US developer outsourcing his work to China

Being a software developer working in the US can net you a salary in the six-figure range. But that doesn’t stop there being some very lazy developers out there earning such high sums of money. A case in point is a developer called Bob, who Verizon just exposed as a lazy genius.

The real identity of the company and developer have not been released, but the details have. The developer, referred to as Bob, works for a “US-based critical infrastructure company.” Bob is a guy who lists 7+ programming languages on his resume and is in his mid-40s, meaning he’s an experienced developer. He’s also been duping his employer for months.

The company he worked for contacted Verizon when it discovered a VPN connection it couldn’t explain on its network. The connection was from Shenyang, China, which set alarm bells ringing. Verizon investigated and discovered the login being used to access the network from China belonged to Bob who sat at his desk every day in the US seemingly working very hard. It was also remaining logged in all day and had been used for months.

Verizon decided to investigate Bob, only to discover his work machine was full of PDF invoices to a consulting firm working out of China. Rather than sitting there working all day, Bob had figured out it was cheaper to outsource his work to China. The total cost? Just a small percentage of his much larger salary.

The one thing that had both Bob’s employer and Verizon scratching their heads is how access was being granted in China. The system not only required login details, it relied on a rotating token RSA key fob. But Bob had figured out a way around that problem: he just snail mailed the RSA token to his consultants in China using FedEx!

So what did Bob do all day instead? His browsing history revealed the majority of his time was spent surfing Reddit, watching cat videos, buying stuff on eBay, and updating Facebook. But just before going home each day, he’d send an email to management to ensure his reputation for being an awesome developer remained intact.

This is both highly amusing and shocking at the same time. This guy is super lazy, yet clever if you don’t count storing the invoices on a work PC. But it actually gets worse. Bob wasn’t just doing this at the company he worked for, he was somehow carrying out the same scam for several other companies, meaning his income was vastly inflated while he sat there chuckling at cats.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/lazy-genius-verizon-catches-us-developer-outsourcing-his-work-to-china-20130116/