Friday, January 18, 2013

You Must Admire Some Liars

No, not Lance nor Manti, but "Bob," who outsourced/subcontracted his own programming job to China.  Chinese workers did his assignments while he surfed the web and clocked out at 5 pm.  If you think about it, "Bob" just applied free market principles to his work life, getting his work done cheaper by others.

Give him a medal!

[To connect remotely to the company computer system, staffers needed a personal identification number, which changed at regular intervals. Employees were issued security tokens, small devices that updated them with the latest generated PIN.

Last spring, the company grew concerned about computer security breaches and asked its IT department to inspect more closely its remote-access logs, looking for unusual patterns of activity.

To their surprise, they saw that someone connected into their network every day from Shenyang, a city in the historical Manchurian north of China, near the Korean peninsula.

More interestingly, the Chinese intruder was logged in using Bob’s PIN and credentials, “yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor,” Mr. Valentine wrote.

“Based on what information they had obtained, the company initially suspected some kind of unknown malware that was able [to] route traffic from a trusted internal connection to China, and then back. This was the only way they could intellectually resolve the authentication issue. What other explanation could there be?”

Verizon investigators were contacted. They inspected Bob’s workstation, trying to find whether he had unintentionally downloaded a virus.

Instead, the cyber-sleuths discovered hundreds of invoices from a software developer in Shenyang.

The investigation revealed that Bob had outsourced his job. To get around the changing PINs, he couriered his security tokens to the Shenyang subcontractor.

It wasn’t clear how long Bob’s scheme had been running because log records only dated back to six months.

While Bob physically reported to the company that hired Verizon to investigate him, he also padded his income as a contract worker for other local firms, for which he also relied on his Chinese outsourcing arrangement.

Looking at his web browsing history, investigators found that Bob spent his workday checking sites such as Reddit, Ebay, Facebook and LinkedIn and watching cat videos. Then he would type an e-mail at the end of the day to update management about his “work” and left at 5 p.m.]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-a-model-employee-got-away-with-outsourcing-his-software-job-to-china/article7409256/

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