Outsourced to China

The Verizon security blog is reporting that a security audit of a "U.S. critical infrastructure company" in 2012 revealed that its "star developer" had outsourced his own job to China so that he could spend his days messing around on the Internet.

Verizon (who supplies the firm's telecommunications) says they were contacted after the company noticed their VPN (a system set up so that employees could work from home) was being regularly logged into from Shenyang, China. Whoever was logging in from China was using the "credentials of the firm's top programmer." For confidentiality reasons we are going to call him "Bob."

Verizon conducted an investigation into Bob's work habits to find out what was going on with the mystery Chinese logins and, according to the Guardian, here's what they found.

It turned out that Bob had outsourced his job to China so that he could spend his days messing around on the Internet. He paid the Chinese company about 1/5 of his six-figure salary. Further investigation suggested that he had the same scam going at other companies in the area. He was collecting multiple salaries and outsourcing all of his work to China.

I spoke with an Internet engineer at DigitalTraffic.com, a company that offers SEO services and website architecture, and was told that although this practice is not common it is absolutely possible.

While all of this was going on, Bob's performance reviews were top-notch. He was an expert at C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc. He was a quiet guy who had been with the company for several years. His code was "clean, well-written" and he performed all of his tasks in a timely fashion. Performance reviews called him "the best developer in the building."

A true American hero.