Outsourcing has been a reality in the American workplace for years now, but we haven't heard of an employee outsourcing his entire job — until now. According to the BBC, a software engineer was apparently outsourcing his entire job to China by paying a fifth of his six-figure salary to a local firm in Shenyang who handled his job for him. The employee reportedly did this through a "fairly standard" VPN connection that was set up to allow employees to work from home. The man actually mailed his RSA security token to China so that workers there could log in to his account, and on the surface it seemed as if he was performing a normal day's work. However, further scrutiny revealed the connection to China, which at first was believed to be malware. Furthermore, a Verizon investigator told the BBC that evidence "suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area." It seems this was less a case of sheer laziness and more a case of someone using cheap foreign labor to pull off a fairly involved scam. 
 
 It seems this news is a bit of a case of life imitating art — check out this 2009 video from The Onion. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Update: An earlier version of this article mistaken said that the software engineer worked for Verizon. His employeer is unknown; Verizon was asked to audit the connection and discovered the link to China. ||||| Posted on 16 January 2013. 
 
 Log analysis can reveal a lot of security mistakes and fails, but a lot of security sins, too.Take for example the incident recently shared by Verizon's Risk Team: called in by a critical infrastructure company to investigate what seemed to be a breach of its networks by the hands of Chinese-based hackers, they ended up discovering a complex scam perpetrated by one of the company's most respected employees."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. 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," explains Verizon's Andrew Valentine.The company started monitoring logs being generated at the VPN concentrator, and discovered an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China, to one of their employees' workstation. What's more, they discovered evidence of the same VPN connection being established almost every day for months before.Fearing that some unknown malware was used to route traffic from a trusted internal connection to China and back - this being the only way they could explain themselves the fact that the VPN connection from China was successfully authenticated - they called in Verizon's team to investigate."Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," shares Valentine.He was a mid-40’s software developer versed in a number of programming languages, a family man, and an employee of the firm for quite a long time. He was "inoffensive and quiet", "someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator."But, as it turned out, he wasn't as inoffensive as they believed at first glance.After having analyzed a forensic image of the employee’s desktop workstation and having found on the computer hundreds ofinvoices from a third party contractor/developer in Shenyang, they came to the shocking conclusion: the employee - whom they dubbed "Bob" - had only been pretending to work. In reality, he had outsourced his job."Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he 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 writes.If you were wondering what "Bob" did with all his free time, the answer is surf the Internet. He spent hours upon hours browsing Reddit and eBay, watching cat videos on YouTube, updating Facebook and LinkedIn. He only stopped for lunch and took his time to fire off an update e-mail to management at the end of his "working" day."Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually," Valentine revealed.But the most interesting thing to note is that no-one spotted the deception earlier. The company's Human Resources department consistently gave him glowing performance reviews because he apparently wrote clean code and submitted it on time."We have yet to see what impact this incident will have, but providing programming code used to run critical national infrastructure providers' systems to off-shore firms seems dangerous at best," Nick Cavalancia, VP, SpectorSoft commented the revelation for Help Net Security. "What many organizations fail to understand is that with proactive monitoring that can alert IT security teams when unacceptable online behaviors occur, this type activity can be thwarted before it becomes an incident."
– Lots of us sneak peeks at Facebook or the web while at work, but one worker at a US company took the habit to a whole new level. A software engineer identified by the Register only as "Bob" outsourced his own work-from-home job to a Chinese subcontractor, then spent his workday checking out posts on Reddit and Facebook, bidding on eBay, and watching cat videos. It worked really well ... for a while. His company's HR department gave his performance high ratings, and he paid the subcontractor only a fifth of his salary. Eventually, IT personnel caught on after noticing that someone using the employer's credentials was logging into the company's system from Shenyang, China. They brought in Verizon investigators, who figured out the scheme. Bob had apparently outsourced other jobs, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. Verizon's security team shared the details with the Help Net Security website. (A case of life imitating art? The Verge notes a 2009 video from the Onion with similarities.)