How would you like to spend your day at the office browsing the Internet, streaming television shows, watching cat videos and just generally not doing much of anything? On top of that, how would you like to be paid six figures? Yeah, that's pretty much the best gig out there.
That is, until you get caught.
According to Verizon, a man it simply referred to as "Bob" was fired from an unnamed infrastructure company for spending all of his work hours surfing the Internet and failing to do anything else. How did he get away with it for so long? Well, he outsourced his work to China.
When the company Bob worked for approached Verizon for a security audit, it had no suspicion that any of its employees were performing a massive scam. The company noticed a consistent connection to one of its employee's virtual private networks (VPN) that came all the way from China. Thinking its computers had been hacked, they asked Verizon to investigate.
"We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs," said Verizon's Andrew Valentine. "This organization had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they'd set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call."
When Verizon started digging, it unearthed hundreds of .pdf invoices from a firm in Shenyang, China. Bob was paying Chinese programmers $50,000 a year to write his code while he surfed the Internet every day. If the man only offered a fifth of his salary, as Valentine suggested, that means he was making $250,000 and pocketing $200,000 for himself.
"Authentication was no problem, [Bob] physically FedExed his RSA 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 9 to 5 work day," Valentine said.
The only "work" Bob actually did, though, was to send an email to his boss detailing what was accomplished during the day. Great plan for a while, but it's probably going to take a while to find another job after that.
