A security check on a US company has reportedly revealed one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China. The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the , watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay. He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.
‘Anomalous activity’
Operator Verizon says the scam came to light after the US firm asked it for an audit, suspecting a security breach. According to Andrew Valentine, of Verizon, the infrastructure company requested the operator’s risk team last year to investigate some anomalous activity on its virtual private network (VPN) logs.
‘Average nine-to-five work day’
The company had discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang to the employee’s workstation that went back months, Mr Valentine said. And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China. Further investigation of the employee’s computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.
“Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] 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 nine-to-five work day,” he added.
The employee no longer worked at the firm, Mr Valentine said.
Well, what can you say about this employee’s outsourcing “scam”? Dumb or ingenuous? Would you resort to the same move to make your workload lighter?
Source: BBC News
Image: TNT Magazine
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