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Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch that activated when fired
- jarsin 2y agoI never understand these types that are smart enough to crash an entire company, but too stupid to make it look like someone else did it.
- progbits 2y agoCould be the case here :) "You only hear about the ones that get caught"
- jarsin 2y agoHe literally wrote a script that locked out everyone on the network the second they disabled his employee account in active directory. He even named the variable Is[DH]EnabledInAD where [DH] is his initials.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toast0 2y agoWell the script is there, but maybe someone else put it there, because they were leaving/being forced out and they wanted to sabotage the company and make it look bad for DH (Article says DL). No need to sabotage the company immediately, revenge is a dish best served cold.
- droopyEyelids 2y agoIt could even have been another employee putting the idea into his head and encouraging him.
- theamk 2y agoOther employee, reddit story, AI chatbot, crime show... it does not matter who put the idea in the head, all that matters is who did the deed.
- droopyEyelids 2y agoMatters to whom
- theamk 2y agoUnlikely, given that he confessed and that in other attack, he damaged the machine only he had access to. I mean, it is theoretically possible there were two disgruntled employees, and second one pinned his crimes to the first one, but I think this is pretty unlikely, given the observeed lack of common sense.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThere have always been people like this, that are simply brainsick and petty, but it's something that is probably being exacerbated by the extreme animosity between the people that run companies, and the people that work on the front lines. I'm not naive enough to think there was a "golden age," when everyone was happy-dappy, but I think it's much worse, now, than it has ever been. I mean, in order to do big, complicated things, you need teams, and teams need to work together. That means much more than just the "hard" skills of individual intelligence, creativity, and discipline. It's also all the "soft" skills, that help the team to retain cohesion, like mutual respect, loyalty, integrity, etc. The problem is that the example needs to start from the top, and there hasn't been much of a good example, up there, recently. It's not difficult to imagine people feeling justified in doing bad things to their team, like deliberately writing shoddy code, taking credit for colleagues' work, bailing out, before their bugs come to the surface, or throwing their teammates under the bus. I always tried to foster a team that had mutual respect, and could focus on common goals, even when everyone had their own motivations and priorities. In my case, it worked, but I know that I was lucky.
- ElFitz 2y ago> but I think it's much worse, now, than it has ever been. At some point, some US employers would hire armed private security companies like Pinkerton to break strikes, often leading to multiple deaths. In other countries, the army would be sent to break prolonged strikes by shooting at strikers. In other words, it has been way worse.
- pr0zac 2y ago> In other countries, the army would be sent to break prolonged strikes by shooting at strikers. This happened in West Virginia as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
- behringer 2y agoWas it worse though? Before they made it obvious. Now it's insidious. They still destroy lives, just the same.
- smitty1e 2y agoThere are so many little bits of logging going on with modern systems that the idea of totally cleaning up all evidence seems far-fetched. Not that one couldn't make it very hard to tell, but even circumstantial evidence in the hands of a good prosecutor can deliver a conviction.
- jmugan 2y agoI thought you were going to say "smart enough to crash an entire company, but too stupid to realize that their intelligence should be put to other uses."
- ranger_danger 2y agoI would think making it look like something that _wasn't_ caused by a human would be even smarter.
- throwaway3572 2y agoInteresting. How would that work? Asking for a friend. :)
- dietr1ch 2y agoA problem is that they can hire smart people to run the investigation, so the target on who to fool moves abruptly.
- cozzyd 2y agoMust have messed up a decimal or some other mundane detail
- jjfjjjjjjjfjjf 2y ago[flagged]
- naruhodo 2y agoMy reaction too. It reminds me of the Simpsons' "Buttzilla" bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPmeLibaVwg&t=112s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPmeLibaVwg&t=112s
- ttyprintk 2y agoMost of the stories in this thread end as quietly as possible.
- fzeroracer 2y agoLooking up the corporation in question (Eaton Corporation), I would say I am not shocked. They seem to have a history of being particularly shitty to their employees.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 2y agoI've never understood this mentality. Your employer might be the absolute worst but this? This is comitting a crime. To knowingly sabotage a company this way is a crime. Technical people like to look for technical loopholes in laws and might say things "him not being there to stop it happening doesn't make it a crime" or whatever simply don't understand the law. Likewise, I've never taken a document or a line of code from an employer. There's nothing I've ever written that I couldn't write better if I started again from scratch. And again you were paid to create those things. You might feel ownership over some work product like this but it doesn't belong to you. Whenever I've left a job, whether it's on good terms or bad, I simply brain dump everything I did and knew and put it out of my mind, hopefully never thinking about it ever again. This is your job, not your life.
- goldfishgold 2y agoIt says something about the inhumanity of our contemporary culture that people willingly accept that our employers have no obligations to us in any way.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 2y agoWhatever your employer did, it's not worth you committing a crime and/or having to defend a lawsuit. It's just not. You will suffer way worse than the momentary schadenfreude you get from watching the company suffer. That doesn't mean you can't look out for yourself. You should absolutely. For example, I would advocate for not quitting your job until you start a new one. Things like giving notice are a convention, not a legal requirement (in the US at least; it can vary by country). Companies can rescind job offers. It's better to start. Then they have to lay you off or fire you. If your conditions are really terrible and you have the luxury of just walking then do that. Walk. Immediately. Let them deal with the repercussions.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
- wodenokoto 2y agoWhat was wrong with him attempting to wipe his laptop?
- tbrownaw 2y agoIt probably highlights that he was trying to cover his trail? (Also if he wrote his fork bomb and AD lockout thing on company time using company hardware, then deleting his code for them might count as destroying company property?)
- wodenokoto 2y agoBut wouldn’t you do that even if you had nothing to hide? I’ve always cleared why work machines to the best of my abilities
- Volundr 2y agoI keep my personal stuff off my work machines specifically because I'll be handing them back intact. If you've done some work on that machine but not saved it anywhere else it's still company property and wiping the machine is destroying it. No one is likely to give you trouble over it unless they go looking for something you supposedly had, but if they wipe it instead of me there's no risk of a misunderstanding. This is good practice anyway, if your laid off or fired unexpectedly, likely your going to be locked out of your machine without notice and without opportunity to clean up.
- tehjoker 2y agoArticle is a bit light on the details. It says he was demoted, and there was a restructuring. Why? Usually when there are motives that are not easy to relate to, the corporate media will tell you what a horrible person they are. When they are easier to relate to, there is a curious silence.
- shipscode 2y agoThis is bad - but I doubt there's an engineer in here that hasn't written throwaway code to make a deadline, joked about some code they wrote being "job security" because it's so confusing, or picked a soon to be deprecated package to use because it was quicker to get up and running. Ethics is lacking in our industry, and as more and more people are laid off, you're going to have the equivalent of tens of thousands of "dead mans switches" going off at every company just out of sheer disincentivization of quality that's become so common in today's engineering culture.
- 63 2y agoI'm aware of at least one project at $work that will definitely break at some point that no one but me knows how to fix. Despite my best efforts to leave breadcrumbs to good resources and an extensive ReadMe, I suspect if I'm gone they just won't care enough to fix it and let employees go back to doing things manually (based on what happens right now when I'm not available to jump on a fix immediately). I wonder how many inadvertant "dead-man switches" like this there are out there where the loss of specific employees can cause a disproportionate amount of damage entirely by accident.
- jjmarr 2y agoIf the project has so little impact that they won't bother maintaining it, that's not really job security.
- bee_rider 2y agoI dunno, the ethics depends on the situation, right? If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship in a system that will have some safety critical application that will hurt the general public, you have a the engineer’s ethical obligation to blow the whistle. If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship because they don’t care to prioritize documentation and robustness in their ad system, that’s management’s prerogative. The customer can be trusted to represent themselves.
- morcus 2y ago> written throwaway code to make a deadline A deadline is a business decision. An engineer makes a tradeoff (incurring tech debt) in order to meet the business goal. How is this remotely an ethics issue?
- neilv 2y agoOver the years, a few times I've heard a (perhaps sometimes apocryphal) story of something like this. The first one involved a programmer who had access to the payroll database. Has anyone heard of someone getting away with this? It seems dumb to me. Someone might feel pettiness impulses when wronged, but grievances are what lawyers are for. (I did hear a variation on this story, where a programmer had artificially rigged up spreadsheets to fail periodically, so that they had to be brought back in as a consultant firefighter to "fix". IIRC, the story was told by a programmer who'd investigated and discovered what was going on. But this is close to standard operating procedure for a lot of development teams, though: through poor technical and business decisions, by accident or design, you guarantee yourself years of encumbered, time-burning work, to maintain and extend that.)
- bdangubic 2y agoHas anyone heard of someone getting away with this? if we heard it she/he would not have gotten away with it :)
- droopyEyelids 2y agoLets reframe the question: Have you ever worked somewhere that did not have outages due to undocumented crap left over from departed employees? This guy is only different superficially, as his descriptive strings show malice instead of incompetence.
- neilv 2y agoWell, has anyone heard of someone escaping appropriate repercussions? For example, maybe the company found out, but decided not to involve the police or demand repayment. For another example, maybe an employee found evidence that suggested such a thing happened, but not far up the chain of command decided that investigating and escalating it wasn't worthwhile to the company. My reason for asking, is that my initial reaction was that is just a bad idea. Then I wondered whether it was a bad idea that was nevertheless happening.
- Volundr 2y ago
- thaumasiotes 2y agoHuh, the autosuggested story here ( https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_action/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_a... ; "C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'" ) seems more interesting than this one.
- timbit42 2y agoAlready posted a week ago.
- setnone 2y agoPretty stupid but at least naming things was done with grace.
- k310 2y agoI was grateful to every employer who canned me, though my parting words, verbal or written, may not have reflected it. :-) I left one paranoid boss on "Take your child to work" day. (Coincidence) but the main lesson was not to let anyone abuse you with insulting demands. I left everything in good order and all documentation up front. I always did. No need for revenge. They all sabotaged themselves way better than I could, even with root passwords, because they did it with their own incompetence and overblown egos.
- PopGreene 2y agoI wonder if we worked for the same company? In my last job, requirements, such as they were, were based on some idea that someone in authority thought we might need. No consideration was given to the needs of the clients of the code. They weren't savvy in the any of the current technologies, so it wasn't even the latest fad. I developed the skill needed to implement their dumbfsck idea-du-jour quickly and without breaking existing code. However, the resulting code was increasingly more convoluted and incomprehensible. I had inherited a god object that I only added to over time. When I quit, my boss knew he was not going to find anyone that could keep up my pace, much less understand the code. He tried to get me to stay, but I told him that I will never work on this code again, so there'd be no point in staying. A couple years later a former coworker told me that the guy that had taken over had a bug in some code that was convoluted but rock solid when I left. I figured he had noodled with the code and broken it. Sucks to be him. Told my coworker to tell him that my advice it to look for another job. So yes, I hear you when you say they're perfectly capable of sabotaging themselves.
- k310 2y agoProbably not. :-) I often found that assignments from my boss were to please the fantasies the boss or their boss, who seemed to pay more attention to those fantasies and toys on their desktop than actually getting things done in a solid way for the customer. On one job, I attended meetings where amazing ideas were dropped off the table because management couldn't see the big picture potential. We were in a market where every vendor had a proprietary database schema, to stymie conversion. A bunch of us proposed giving away an open database schema, and competing in that larger market, which was beneficial to customers, and a meritocracy. Oh no. That would mean that product quality was more important than slick salesmanship. The boss sued a disgruntled employee for hacking his computer, and after he won, the judgment was "Well, you two work it out". Right. One director had a mania for "Windows NT is the next great thing" in production systems. Fortunately, I was on the Solaris side. I didn't hang around long enough to hear the success stories (as in throwing chairs, I imagine)
- Brian_K_White 2y ago"Whoever he is, he's very cunning and won't do anything to atract attention and we'll never figure it out." ... Richard Priar the lowly data entry drone rolls up to the front door of the building in a lambo with a huge painting in the passenger seat...
- neilv 2y agoDon't forget to upvote a post when commenting: > 237. Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch that activated when fired (theregister.com) 64 points by defrost 7 hours ago | flag | hide | 63 comments
- amai 2y agoShould have used ransomware instead of the obvious kill-switch: https://ransomware.org/blog/beware-the-ire-of-ex-employees/ https://ransomware.org/blog/beware-the-ire-of-ex-employees/
- ttyprintk 2y agoSure, a bad actor who knows the egress rules would naturally think of that. Maybe modify all authorized_keys with command=“sleep 3456”. I think a white-knight signal would be to rotate ssl keys, trying to intentionally expire the cert. Easy for anyone to grep in code. The problem is in-between.
- yaky 2y agoMany years ago, I found a piece of corporate code that stopped working when a specific person ID was not marked active in the Users table in a DB for a specific application. That person was the long-time developer responsible for supporting that application, who finally happily retired. This took a while to happen, since that DB was not kept updated very well, it was easy to find, and nothing malicious happened. Just some bad debug code that made it into prod.