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Programmer Fired After Company Found He Outsourced His Job to China and Watched Cat Videos Instead of Working

Jan. 16, 2013 3:06pm Liz Klimas

Security Audit Reveals Employee Outsourced His Six Figure Job to China

(Photo: Shutterstock.com)

A software programmer was recently fired after the company he worked for found out he outsourced his job, which he got paid a six-figure salary to perform, to a worker in China.

Andrew Valentine wrote on the Verizon Business blog (which is down at this time) that these actions by the employee identified as “Bob” were discovered during a log analysis that is intended to find security mistakes. In fact, the name of the blog post is cheekily called “Case Study: Proactive Log Review Might Be a Good Idea.”

Help Net Security reported Valentine, with Verizon’s risk team, saying that a US-based company asked them for help to understand activity they saw in VPN logs that showed an active connection from China to one of their employees who worked remotely in the U.S. More concerning is that they saw the VPN connection was being made nearly every day for months. The company feared malicious activity could have been conducted and brought in Verizon to investigate.

What Verizon found, Valentine explained according to Help Net Security, ultimately lead them to the knowledge that “Bob” spent his time surfing the Internet, looking at cat videos on YouTube and searching on eBay and Reddit, instead of doing his job.

“Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average 9 to 5 work day,” Valentine wrote.

But that’s not all.

“Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually,” Valentine wrote.

Help Net Security reported the blog saying that the employee’s work even got good reviews from H.R. for meeting deadlines and writing clean code. The one bit of work “Bob” did seem to complete each day was an end of day email sent to management.

Featured image via Shutterstock.com.

(H/T Reddit, The Register)

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Comments (57)

ExtremeRight
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 5:49pm
Its this guys boss that should be fired… It is his responsibility to get the job done in the cheapest and fastest time… Instead he paid for a middleman. Make this guy the boss he obviously knows how to get things done.

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- TheBurningTruth
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 7:50pm
  Yeah, I’ll bet you’re one of the first to whine about “outsourcing” and “shipping jobs overseas”. If the employee does it, you excuse the employee and blame the boss. If the boss does it, well again you blame the boss. The company most probably knew that it could get this service much more cheaply overseas but decided to use local talent and pay the extra. Isn’t that what everybody wants?
  
  When a company hires a person to do that job, they’re to do that job UNLESS they’re specifically given the option to subcontract. There’s also the near certainty that his employment agreement had security requirements including both protecting company property as well as safeguarding access to the company system.
  
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- turkey13
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 8:24pm
  Boy are these idiots in trouble! This guy is setting an example for the whole country. He is probably one of the few that is following the presidents orders from 2007. Remember when he told Joe The Plumber that all the country needed was for us little folks to spread the wealth. He knew that the rich couldn’t change their ways so it had to be the little folks to do it. Shucks – I read somewhere that the Obama’s had a net wealth of a little over a million in 2007 to $ 16 million now. Now that is spreading the wealth!
  
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- Lawrence7
  Posted on January 17, 2013 at 10:04am
  Yeah, lets put all of the most dishonest people in charge. That’ll fix it.
  
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- Chuck Stein
  Posted on January 17, 2013 at 1:07pm
  @ The Burning Truth — Couldn’t agree with you more.
  
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PocoDedo
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 5:35pm
Confucius say: management no likey when you win at game dey create.

Perhaps when the ELITES (and elite wannabes) stop gaming the system, perhaps we the little guys will follow suit. They have created an unjust world with their actions and then they have the gall to be surprised when similar underhanded actions are mimicked by us. Funny that.

I say: this guy appears to have created almost as many jobs as Obama has–good on him.

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Daniel
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:50pm
I give this guy credit. He ginned the system, and got paid big bucks. If he did this long enough, he probably can move somewhere that has a lower cost of living and live on any investments. The companies are not going to do anything about it, because it would cost them more to go after him, then to just allow him to leave quietly. Why complain about this, look at all the CEOs who lied to get where they are/were, sucked millions out of the company, screwed over thousands of employees, and got a golden parachute to leave.

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RemoteCoderz
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:39pm
Dayum, wish I would have thought about this. LOL

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- JRook
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:51pm
  Rather smart economic news. But then again outsourcing jobs and keeping the excess profits is for the overpaid CEO’s and wealthy investors…. not the lowly workers. Let’s hope this guy now writes a program that eliminates the need for some service or product Verizon executives make excess profits from. Excess is define as direct cost, plus indirect costs, plus overhead plus 15% return on equity. Anything above that is excess and can only be maintained by the company padding the pockets of congress and regulators to protect them from startups and competitors.
  
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shakedowncrews
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:39pm
So what’s the problem?! He just did to the company what companies to do employees all the time!

The security token issue is the only part i have a problem with. Otherwise, screw em. We just had a new VP come in and decide to outsource an entire department to Asia. It was the most highly productive group in the company, but he thinks he can hire 5 Asians for the price of 1. And the company they contracted in Southern Asia outsources to India, so it’s pretty much the same bloody thing.

I think he had a darn good racket going on. Good on him.

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TH30PH1LUS
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:39pm
Isn’t this exactly what the FED and our Congress are doing?

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- NeoFan
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:49pm
  If it was then at least the work would be getting done. It’s not.
  
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tommytruck
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:36pm
@EHANSON005 – Exactly! My second thought, after “ingenious!,” was “lol – definately a programmer.” The FIRST thing I would have done was make sure I covered my tracks. An IP from China screams, “LOOK AT ME!” Otherwise, that was really an ingenious gig.

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blazingaway
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:26pm
He physically FedExed his RSA token to China … that and he deceived these companies …
I’m surprised they don’t sue the crap out of him

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pappywags
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:23pm
Looks like he was doing exactly what the major corporations are doing ever call the Sprint help desk in New Deli? or how about American Express Customer Service?
It is okay for California to hire China to build a bridge replacing the Oakland Bay Bridge but not for an individual to be creative. Apparently he work was done to the companies satisfaction. If he didn’t break the law what did he do wrong? He just subcontracted his work, pretty ingenious.

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MisterSarcastic
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 4:15pm
Now they’ll hire the Chinese firm and lay off hundreds of American workers. Thanks a lot, Bob.

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jman-6
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:58pm
I don’t see where he did anything wrong. As long as he was not violating company policy by sub-contracting and no company proprietary info was compromised then no harm no foul. They payed him to do a job and the work was done and as long as he wasn’t forbidden to do it what’s the problem?

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ehanson005
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:56pm
The only problem was allowing the chineese programmer to log into the work server directly. If he had set up a seperate machine at his home location and allowed the chineese firm to open a remote desktop session on it they could have actually been doing the work from his home. He never would have been caught.

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- ehayes2006
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 6:58pm
  As a PC/Internet/Network specialist, I agree. He forgot the one step, that of “separation”. Unfortunately his mistake is going to have huge consequences. Now every US company is going to start outsourcing to Chinese programmers, which would be a mistake if they don’t have code verifiers at their end to make sure that the Chinese code doesn’t have any security vulnerabilities. All in all, I have one thing to say to the guy that got caught…”IDIOT!”. He has single-handedly probably crushed the job market for coders in the US. I will say this, though….asking the Chinese to write code that is going into high-profile US internet markets is almost treason (or perhaps IS) in light of the fact that they are at war with the US on the Internet Front. Almost all of their IT consulting firms are Nationalized, meaning they report (and share their data) directly with their Government. With a code database to draw from, the Chinese cyber-teams can program scams and hacks. And giving them direct access to a pc vpn’d into his work network? Allowing them to pore thru their codebase? For shame. Mr. Valentine is lucky he isn’t facing a damage lawsuit from the employer that caught him for sharing copyright-protected data and going against his non-disclosure agreement.
  
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- Bub47
  Posted on January 17, 2013 at 1:17am
  It is already crushed. I am a Windows CE BSP consultant and the last company I worked for outsourced to both Monza, Italy and Lviv, Ukraine. The company before that had an Indian immigrant that they sent back to Bangalore, India to set up a programming shop for them. This after they held a meeting with the US programmers asking, hypothetically of course, what it would take to outsource. They assured everyone that this was just an exercise for grins. The funny part was that when they sent the Indian back home they forgot to reduce his pay to Indian scale. He lived like a flicking KING!
  
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1FreeVoice
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:43pm
Efficient indeed, he maximized his reward for effort expended, and his employers got more out of it than the US Gov. does for paying people to surf the bureaucracy for benefits. His employers did get the work they were paying for, they just overpaid – to a middleman. I don’t approve, certainly, but I am not even sure if he committed a violation of anything but ethics. Nowadays that hardly seems to count for much.

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Locked
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:41pm
That’s actually pretty creative. It’s like I was told growing up, “You don’t get paid to work hard. You get paid to work smart and get results.”

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lel2007
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:41pm
“It’s nice to feel that you have a purpose.” ~ Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf USArmy

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Walkabout
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:41pm
This programmer just did what General Electric CEO Immelt does all the time.

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girlnurse
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:35pm
I LOVE it! Haha…Mark my words…this WILL be a Hollywood movie! Are they going to make it a serious drama or funny like “Office Space”?

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- scjeff
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:55pm
  Office Space 2! This guy’s only mistake was shipping his encryption fob to the Chinese guy’s hands. He should have set up a WebEx and shared control of his screen. He could have used two monitors and still have watched his “Can haz cheezbrgr?”
  
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- biohazard23
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:55pm
  I hope they include the Bobs and some flair! 37 pieces, to be exact.
  
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circleDwagons
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:34pm
LOL But the work got done. We pay govnerment employees for not working.

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RANGER1965
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:32pm
Sounds like he worked for the DOD.

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ginger100
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:21pm
just the kind of hard hitting news stories i want read, good job the blaze

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SocialistSlayer
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:16pm
This guy is smarter than they thought !

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media-bias-steals-elections
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:13pm
Gee, I guess we better include fees for Chinese patent lawyers the next time we negotiate that deal?
There is no such thing as writing code, you are creating a patent that some CEO is going to sell for $10 million, and you get the $50K?

Does Legal Zoom.com cover this?

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Laugh-ler14
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:13pm
haha that is genius! Sounds like he read the “4-hour work week” book.

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Gonzo
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:11pm
Obama is running the same scam.

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- BODYBAG
  Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:38pm
  The entire nation is.
  Thats why the country is in the shape its in.
  Everything is a shell game or ponzi scheme.
  This is only ONE guy that got “caught”.
  
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sizzlinsexybeckster
Posted on January 16, 2013 at 3:07pm
This is exactly what I was talking about in my last comment! Wholly crap!

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