Outsourced: Employee Sends Own Job To China; Surfs Web

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Outsourced: Employee Sends Own Job To China; Surfs Web

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What began as a company's suspicion that its infrastructure was being hacked turned into a case of a worker outsourcing his own job to a Chinese consulting firm, according to reports that cite an investigation by Verizon's security team. The man was earning a six-figure salary.

The anonymous company, identified only as a critical infrastructure firm, asked Verizon's Web security personnel to look into data that showed its virtual private network was being accessed from China — even as the employee whose credentials were used to log in from overseas was sitting in the company's offices, using his computer.

As Emil Protalinski writes at The Next Web, the company's security measures included a coded fob which, the investigating team learned, a code developer had shipped to Shenyang, China, so that a company there could perform his assigned work.

And it turns out that the job done in China was above par — the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building," according to the Verizon Security Blog.

It seems that Verizon has removed the page publishing this "case study" — either that, or it has merely become unavailable for some other reason. But a cached version of the story offers more details. The report, which assigns the inventive employee the fictitious name of "Bob," described him as a family guy in his 40s, with extensive software knowledge.

After they were called in to look for rogue software that allowed hackers to perfectly mimic an employee's log-in, and maintain an active and secure connection, the investigators instead found "hundreds of .pdf notices from a third party contractor/developer in (you guessed it) Shenyang, China."

The Verizon team even found that "Bob" kept a regular schedule at his office:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

And as they learned, his schedule also included sending less than one-fifth of his salary to the Chinese firm. Verizon's investigators say the evidence they uncovered suggests "Bob" might have had similar arrangements at several companies.

"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," according to the Security Blog.

It is not yet clear whether "Bob" has read former kickboxer Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek, which explores ideas that include "Outsourcing Life" and "Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office."

HidariMigi on February 3rd, 2018 at 18:56 UTC »

Not a Verizon programmer, but an employee at a computer company which used Verizon as a service provider.

Here is the actual story, as revealed in a Verizon's security risk team case study:

We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs. This organization had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they’d set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call.

...Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed him logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor.

The best part is this:

...Investigators checked his web browsing history, and that told the whole story.

A typical ‘work day’ for Bob looked like this:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.

2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

5:00 p.m. – Go home

poopellar on February 3rd, 2018 at 17:03 UTC »

The Verizon team even found that "Bob" kept a regular schedule at his office:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

Hey, Bob. How you doin now?

robmneilson on February 3rd, 2018 at 15:52 UTC »

He should have been promoted to management.