In a bizarre twist, an American developer has gotten fired for outsourcing his own job to China. According to a Verizon Business Security Blog, “Bob,” a programmer at an American firm, was paying Chinese developers to do his work for him. Bob earned “several hundred thousand dollars per year” and was paying the Chinese coders about $50,000. It was apparently money well spent as Bob received glowing performance reviews.
Bob got caught when a review of VPN logs turned up an unauthorized VPN link from China. He had mailed his RSA key fob to the developers doing his work, and they were using it to log in to the corporate network.
The security researchers who investigated the incident said Bob used his “free time” at work to surf the Internet, spending a lot of time on eBay and Facebook and watching cat videos.