In this economy you'd think there aren't many six-figure jobs that let you wander aimlessly throughout the web all day between cat videos and catching up with social networks. And you'd be right. But one software developer in his 40s was living the dream nonetheless thanks to the magic of outsourcing.
A Verizon report recently detailed one the case of an employee at a U.S. based infrastructure company who was outsourcing his entire job to China for a fifth of his salary. The man in question, referred to as Bob, had gone as far as physically shipping his RSA security token to China so that the third-party contractor could go through the two-factor authentication and log-in under his credentials during the workday.
But eventually the scheme was discovered when Verizon received a request from the unnamed company asking for help in understanding anomalous activity it was witnessing in its VPN logs.
Upon seeing an open and active connection from Shenyang, China, the companies initially suspected some kind of unknown zero-day malware had been able to infiltrate the network. However, further investigation proved otherwise, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm.
A look at his browsing history revealed what his typical work day consisted of surfing Reddit for a couple of hours, having lunch, browsing social networks, then emailing his end of day update to management. Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area.
Amusingly, it seems that Bob at least chose his developers carefully. Performance reviews cited his clean, well-written code, and even regarded him as the best developer in the building.
