An ingenious software developer discovered a way to outsource his entire job to someone in China, but a security check within his company foiled his plan. According to the BBC, the software developer supposedly spent his workday surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and checking out eBay and Reddit.
The employee, in his 40s, reportedly paid about a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company in Shenyang, China, the BBC reporter. After his employers suspected that someone had breached their security, they asked Verizon to conduct a security check.
Verizon's Andrew Valentine stated that the company requested that Verizon investigate "anomalous activity on its virtual private network (VPN) logs."
In an Internet security blog, Valentine wrote, "This organization have 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."
According to the BBC, the company then discovered the connection to Shenyang from the employee's workstation that had been ongoing for months. HuffingtonPost reported that a look into the employee's web browsing history then revealed hours of web surfing and cat video watching.
Valentine added, "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 $50,000 annually."
According to Valentine, the employee no longer works for his company.
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