this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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(page 3) 18 comments
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[–] [email protected] 88 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Why do kill switches when you can just hog all the work of maintaining some critical part of the infrastructure and make it's functioning and maintenance so opaque and impenetrable that the employer can't replace or fire you without their shit catching fire soon after. It doesn't have to be malicious or illegal.

https://youtu.be/0jK0ytvjv-E

His efforts to sabotage their network began that year, and by the next year, he had planted different forms of malicious code, creating "infinite loops" that deleted coworker profile files, preventing legitimate logins and causing system crashes

I wish this guy was were actually politically motivated, but he seems to have been just really petty minded person.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

Why do kill switches when you can just hog all the work of maintaining some critical part of the infrastructure and make it's functioning and maintenance so opaque and impenetrable that the employer can't replace or fire you without their shit catching fire soon after.

This is literally my firm's core business practice. We've been at it for so long that at this point we have to be included in competing bids because we are the only ones in the world that can do certain specific things.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reminds me of the timebombs in windows 2000. I guess he's forced to start fresh.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Timebombs in Windows 2000?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

guy really tagged his name on the kill function, which was running on his own system. smh my head

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Initially makes me wonder how the employer could be so dumb as to give one employee so much access. But then I remember a former employer of mine did the same and worse.

Colleague was known for writing his comments in such a way that only he could read them, including mixing in German (US based company doing all business in English). He was also the admin of our CAD system and would use it as leverage to get his way on things, including not giving even default user access to engineers he didn't like. We migrated systems and everyone was thinking, "this is it, the chance to root this guy out of the admin position" and... they gave him admin access again. Not even our IT department had the access he had. I left before the guy retired / was fired, this post is making me wonder if he left peacefully or left bricking the CAD system out.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Koala tea internal code review practices

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

And now imagine doing this or sort of this destruction in a smaller company that has one to three mediocre admins at highest. One can kill this company and they would never get it why the computers got weird.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A 55-year-old software developer

... and...

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate "realignment" in 2018 that "reduced his responsibilities," the DOJ said.

So he was 48 at the time he started this. Was he planning on retiring from all work at 48? I can't imagine any other employer would want to touch him with a 10ft (3.048 meters) pole after he actively sabotaged his prior employer's codebase causing global outages.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Oh yeah, but the thing that usually offsets the intrusive thoughts is a lot of courts treat this as the crime of "hurting rich people" which comes with like 30 years in pound you in the ass penitentiary.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

He fucked up. But it's also kinda funny.

[–] [email protected] 132 points 2 months ago (4 children)

This kill switch, the DOJ said, appeared to have been created by Lu because it was named "IsDLEnabledinAD," which is an apparent abbreviation of "Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory."

Lu named these codes using the Japanese word for destruction, "Hakai," and the Chinese word for lethargy, "HunShui,"

[Lu]’s "disappointed" in the jury's verdict and plans to appeal

No, this guy is cooked, there’s even evidence of him looking up how to hide processes and quickly delete files, absolutely no way an appeal would work out for him, I don’t think an “I got hacked” argument is going to work.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I take it he hasn't heard about "hiding things in the open".

That would be, for example, using a constant of some near year in "end time" column meaning unfinished action.

Or just making some part that will inevitably have to be changed - "write-only", as in unreadable. Or making documentation of what he did bad enough in some necessary places that people would have to ask him.

So many variants, and such obvious stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

That's an amazing point, actually

[–] [email protected] 75 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It would only work if he owned the code and the company stopped paying. There's lots of precedent for that.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

That’s hilarious.

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