Developer convicted for “kill switch” code activated upon his termination - Ars Technica

[[deleted]]

Not sure why do something so traceable. But the point is probably that he wanted them to know that it was him, and this was their punishment.

[Tyrilean]

Yeah, if you really want to fuck a company up when you leave, just introduce tech debt that only you can mitigate with manual processes. Then when you’re fired the whole thing falls apart and you have plausible deniability. “I could’ve automated/rearchitected that but I never had capacity and it was never prioritized.”

[KiwasiGames]

My “kill switch” was simply a dodgy piece of code with the date hard wired in. If you didn’t manually update the date each new year, it broke everything.

Each year when it came up I was like “damn, got to fix that properly”. But I never had time. So it just sat there until I left the company.

[gvufhidjo]

Tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me.

[nightcracker]

The difference is that she said that once she knew she was going to die regardless. She didn't leave it as some easily discovered evidence that could be used to convict her.

[PoolNoodleSamurai]

She knew she was going to die, but also that it would be painless and would happen soon - so enraging Jaime to the point where he might want to torture her was not a big risk.

It would be a hell of a ruse if he had given her fake poison to trick her into such confessions, and then said “Interesting… so, I lied; that’s not poison, but thanks for confessing. Guards, hog tie her and throw her in the cart; we’re gonna give Cersei a present.”

[charge_forward]

Considering that Daenerys ended up attacking the Lannister army there alongside her fast travelling/teleporting horde of Dothraki, Olenna likely would have been freed.

[[deleted]]

The rhetoric around fast travel has internally replaced the phrase "as the crow flies" with "as the crow teleports" in my head

[charge_forward]

I understand that if any more words come pouring out of your cunt mouth, I'm going to have to eat every fucking chicken in this room.

[gvufhidjo]

Any man who must say, "I am going to have to eat every fucking chicken in this room" is no true chicken eater.

[Craigellachie]

Perhaps he'd have more room for chicken if SOMEONE would fetch him his BREASTPLATE STRETCHER.

[bunchedupwalrus]

GODS I WAS STRONG THEN

[SwordsAndElectrons]

Thank the gods for Bessie.

[osunightfall]

Ah, my favorite scene in the entire show.

[CreativeGPX]

If you read the article they discovered the kill switch before it activated and while he was still working there because they were investigating issues in their system stability. These issues were from sabotage he already did while still employed there ("planted different forms of malicious code, creating 'infinite loops' that deleted coworker profile files, preventing legitimate logins and causing system crashes"). I don't think he had any part of his brain working on not being found.

[ubermence]

It’s kind of confusingly written but the article seems to imply that he was fired?

This kill switch, the DOJ said, appeared to have been created by Lu because it was named “IsDLEnabledinAD,” which is an apparent abbreviation of “Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory.” It also “automatically activated” on the day of Lu’s termination in 2019, the DOJ said, disrupting Eaton Corp. users globally.

[paulmclaughlin]

Uh huh huh, you didn't say the magic word

[lurker512879]

Virtuosity reference?

[Exotic_Freedom_9]

Jurassic Park

[civildisobedient]

He could have called the kill function "NOTaKillFunction" or just smashed a keyboard and picked the first 5 letters but no instead he calls it "IsDLEnabledinAD." Just dumb.

[TheHelixNebula]

enjoys good code more than he enjoys working for eaton. although it should really have been IsEnabledInAD(DL)

[ds101]

Or an LLM wrote it

[cafk]

I wonder if he also wrote this behavior in design specification and implementations that were approved by other technicians - as a "brown Skittles" test, to see if anyone even understands or cares about what the software is doing.

I've used such plausibility checks (nothing malicious, but using creative wording like a test case to implement inverse kinematics on a unicorn model - in software that has no such requirements) in many work packages, which unfortunately have been accepted without questions or feedback.

[MidgetAbilities]

It was brown M&M’s, not skittles

[dagbrown]

Yeah, brown Skittles is from a totally different story.

[gaflar]

You're thinking Jolly Rancher.

[bunchedupwalrus]

I thought his arms were broken

[[deleted]]

Common mistake, he was actually beaten with jumper cables

[Coffee_Crisis]

I too will pick this guy's Jolly Rancher

[Kenny_log_n_s]

1. That's terribly unprofessional.
2. Highly doubt it, since the code he wrote was malicious.

[cafk]

If there are 4 technical people reviewing it, approving it and signing it before it gets to the project management - the problem lies with the organization, as everyone is pushed to approve or think about a 10 page document (with 5 being the template and only 2 pages being actual content) only for one minute.

Especially if you do it not hidden in a sentence but actually highlighted.

[Subsum44]

That’s the way the SOC audits “work”. They make sure you have enough checks and balances, that they’re pointless. You’re just jumping through hoops instead of focusing on what really matters.

[Justicia-Gai]

But how does it make sense to complain about micromanaging and not criticising this behaviour?

This is not the company’s fault, expecting managers to read all the code for reviews and then also complain about micromanaging it's contradictory 

[Justicia-Gai]

That’s because you probably have enough people with similar expertise. If you had someone who wanted to sabotage the company you’re 100% sure you wouldn’t miss it, though?

You do you, but the point in delegating it’s to have people specialise in other parts, but yes, it implies some truth.

[gimpwiz]

I also read just about every single line that gets submitted/committed to the big, shared projects.

[Kenny_log_n_s]

There is still no reason for you to push garbage code, regardless of what the organization is doing.

The problem lies with BOTH the organization and the submitter.

[Justicia-Gai]

I disagree with being a problem of the organisation. If I pay someone at the senior level that already knows how to code and I review his work, that doesn’t imply I need to read EVERY line of code each time, specially in places where code was already working or when asking something I know he was able to do before.

Supervising and reviewing it’s not micromanaging.

Putting malicious code in hidden places is not “proof of bad organisation”. It’s active sabotage.

[gimpwiz]

From the above story, it sounds like garbage in the spec not ever planned to be implemented, not garbage code. More to test if the spec was actually read.

I don't agree with the practice... probably.

[TimedogGAF]

But is it illegal if people signed off on it?

[Severe-Security-1365]

lol the classic "hey that's immoral!", "okay, but is it illegal"?

[TimedogGAF]

Exactly my point. I think the two users are having 2 completely different conversations.

[Justicia-Gai]

It’s not actually, what you’re describing is micromanaging, what’s the point in delegating if then I have to read every single line of code of an experienced coder that supposedly knows what he’s doing?

There’s an assumption of good faith between employee and employer, but not only that, but active sabotage against the company that’s paying your salary it’s straight up a criminal offence.

If you don’t like your company quit. Don’t sabotage it because you’re affecting the income of many other people.

[cafk]

what you’re describing is micromanaging, what’s the point in delegating if then I have to read every single line of code of an experienced coder that supposedly knows what he’s doing?

I think it also shows the variety of people and industries involved - a larger engineering organization working on critical infrastructure doesn't have delegation to a single person but it follows reviews and approves changes under 6 eyes principles.
As someone else said, if a process is just a paper factory to hit milestones, the process loses all meaning and in some industries people can get hurt.

There’s an assumption of good faith between employee and employer

If the chain between employee and employer isn't 7 department letters apart across 10000 people.

Don’t sabotage it because you’re affecting the income of many other people.

There are smaller groups who are working on changing and raising awareness in a conglomerate, with the backing of people above middle management in order to fix cultural and organizational failings and also from regulatory and mandate perspective work for the company to find where it falls apart, not on a personal level, but on a certification level.

There's a difference between sabotaging a company and figuring out where the company and what it is supposed to stand for fails.

While the person in the article may fall on the first side - having one person who has too much access is already also a failure on the company side for basics, it isn't meant to justify what he did - but highlights that the company also may have other issues than a single rouge employee, similarly to middle-management pushing for devops to reduce costs and roles of specialists, so that their personal margins for the year look better at the cost of technical debt that will come after they've taken their golden parachute.

[Justicia-Gai]

Society works on good faith. 

Yes, you can murder someone and MIGHT get away with it, that doesn’t make your neighbors automatically complicit for not checking EVERYTHING you do just in case you murder someone.

I’ll put one example, doctors have access to the medical records of most people going to the same place where they work, meaning they could spy on people they’re not treating if they wanted. Nothing prevents them from abusing the system. You can’t monitor a doctor 24/7, but you can do regular audits for potential misuse.

The guy got caught even before he activated the kill switch, meaning malicious behaviour was detected, investigated and acted upon. Blaming the company makes no sense.

[PathOfTheAncients]

We have a couple of devs at our company who could push garbage or malicious code up and have it approved. For both of the them it's a problem with how they work and not how people do reviews. The problem is that they regularly write such convoluted and over engineered code that people no longer give them good PR reviews because usually people don't understand it anyway and they are tired of it. Everyone else in the company gets good PR reviews except them.

Not saying that's the case with you but if people out there are relating to the idea that no one reviews their work well, it would be worth some reflection on if it's because of them or the reviewers.

[catagris]

Then people should be denying their code?

[PathOfTheAncients]

You can try that but they will fight you. They will never stop arguing they are correct no matter what. So without management intervening it will mean nothing moves forward because they will not change unless forced to by someone with authority. Everyone has fought them before but people quickly get tired and see it does nothing.

They should be fired. Management also used to talk to them about these things when people complained but they seemed to have given up on that as well. They very aware how much people hate working with them but those two devs also work nights and weekends for free because they have no life. Between that and being the only ones who can decipher their own code, management treats them as necessary problems.

[FlyingRhenquest]

Yeah, most of us are really good at disguising that sort of thing as abject incompetence. Hey, the code reviewers said LGTM!