Thursday, January 17, 2013

"Honey, I Outsourced My Own Job to China..."

...booked the spread and watched a lot of cat videos.

From the Globe and Mail:

How a 'model' employee got away with outsourcing his software job to China
Bob was his company’s best software developer, got glowing performance reviews and earned more than $250,000 a year.

Then one day last spring, Bob’s employer, an American infrastructure company, thought its computer network had been attacked by a virus.

The ensuing forensic probe revealed that Bob’s software code had in fact been the handiwork of a Chinese subcontractor.

Bob was paying a Chinese firm about $50,000 a year to do his work, then spent the day surfing the web, watching cat videos and updating his Facebook page.

“This particular case was pretty unique,” computer security investigator Andrew Valentine, who helped uncover Bob’s scheme, said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail. “We thought it was actually pretty clever.”
Mr. Valentine made Bob’s tale public in a blog post on Monday and it has since been the talk of tech websites....MORE
...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....