Look, we've all been there: Sometimes at your job you just wanna tell your boss to shove it.
But just be sure that you're not risking a decade in the federal slammer over it:
[A] 55-year-old Texas man allegedly built an automated bird flipper in the form of a kill switch that crashed his company's systems and locked people out of their accounts when he was fired. Satisfying as that may have been, he now faces up to 10 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice, for setting the trip wire on his way out the door.
The DOJ says that 55-year-old Houston resident Davis Lu "was employed as a software developer for [a company] headquartered in Beachwood, Ohio, from November 2007 to October 2019." However, a 2018 "corporate alignment" demoted him, after which he "began sabotaging his employer's systems."
Just a few weeks before his dismissal, he had wired his company's network up good:
By Aug. 4, 2019, he introduced malicious code that caused system crashes and prevented user logins. Specifically, he created 'infinite loops' (in this case, code designed to exhaust Java threads by repeatedly creating new threads without proper termination and resulting in server crashes or hangs), deleted coworker profile files, and implemented a 'kill switch' that would lock out all users if his credentials in the company's active directory were disabled.
The disgruntled employee named the kill switch "IsDLEnabledinAD", an abbreviation of "Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory."
The angry worker attempted, unsuccessfully, to cover his tracks: His internet search history "revealed he had researched methods to escalate privileges, hide processes, and rapidly delete files."
The company "suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses as a result of Lu's actions." And now the price is coming due:
The jury convicted Lu of causing intentional damage to protected computers, for which he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Alright, let's not let that dude into the prison computer lab!
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