Posted on 08/22/2025 2:34:53 PM PDT by ransomnote
A Chinese national was sentenced today to four years in prison and three years of supervised release for writing and deploying malicious code on his then-employer’s network.
“The defendant breached his employer’s trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for a U.S. company,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “However, the defendant’s technical savvy and subterfuge did not save him from the consequences of his actions. The Criminal Division is committed to identifying and prosecuting those who attack U.S. companies, whether from within or without, to hold them responsible for their actions.”
"The FBI works relentlessly every day to ensure that cyber actors who deploy malicious code and harm American businesses face the consequences of their actions,” said Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “I am proud of the FBI cyber team’s work which led to today’s sentencing and hope it sends a strong message to others who may consider engaging in similar unlawful activities. This case also underscores the importance of identifying insider threats early and highlights the need for proactive engagement with your local FBI field office to mitigate risks and prevent further harm.”
In March, a jury convicted Davis Lu, 55, legally residing in Houston, of causing intentional damage to protected computers. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Lu was employed as a software developer for the victim company headquartered in Beachwood, Ohio, from November 2007 to October 2019. Following a 2018 corporate realignment that reduced his responsibilities and system access, Lu began sabotaging his employer’s systems. By Aug. 4, 2019, he introduced malicious code that caused system crashes and prevented user logins. Specifically, he created “infinite loops” (in this case, code designed to exhaust Java threads by repeatedly creating new threads without proper termination, resulting in server crashes or hangs), deleted coworker profile files, and implemented a “kill switch” that would lock out all users if his credentials in the company’s active directory were disabled. The “kill switch” code — which Lu named “IsDLEnabledinAD”, abbreviating “Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory” — was automatically activated when he was placed on leave and asked to surrender his laptop on Sept. 9, 2019, and impacted thousands of company users globally.
Additionally, on the day he was directed to turn in his company laptop, Lu deleted encrypted data. His internet search history revealed he had researched methods to escalate privileges, hide processes, and rapidly delete files, indicating an intent to obstruct the efforts of his co-workers to resolve the system disruptions. Lu’s employer suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses as a result of his actions.
The FBI Cleveland Field Office investigated the case.
Senior Counsel Candina S. Heath of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel J. Riedl and Brian S. Deckert for the Northern District of Ohio prosecuted the case.
CCIPS investigates and prosecutes cybercrime in coordination with domestic and international law enforcement agencies, often with assistance from the private sector. Since 2020, CCIPS has secured the conviction of over 180 cybercriminals, and court orders for the return of over $350 million in victim funds.
Updated August 21, 2025Press Release Number: 25-873TopicCybercrime
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Okay, how many other Chinese nationals installed kill switches on other company networks. Just wonderin’....
“infinite loops”
So...like a Windows updated?
Newman!!
I was a Unix admin. I didn’t need a kill switch. As root all I hade to do was rm *.*. The company should have removed the ChiComs login before canning him.
(removed the ChiComs login before canning him)
The time bomb 💣 was waiting
for that to happen
Many years ago, I was the System Administrator for a financial entity. A newbie person I didn’t trust was hired by my boss and was supposed to do first line support. He kept asking me why I wouldn’t allow him an administrator account on our Wide Area Network, mainframe partition access (mainframe was remote), or minicomputers. I said that I and another person were responsible for that activity and that we were on cal 24 hours a day for anything and that we were happy he helped where he could. However, he just wouldn’t give it up, and my boss asked me and the other person with my kind of access multiple times over several years to reconsider. Thankfully, he never overruled me.
Fast forward to when this guy quits. He had gathered up what he could to sue my employer over his independent contractor status and a condition in the contract. Well, it was pretty airtight and my employer settled out of court for tens of thousands of dollars. It was all around crud my boss had agreed to or said at some point.
I have no doubt this guy would have considered doing something like this felon did, if given the chance.
I have no idea why any company would ever trust somebody from a foreign country who is not a sole citizen of the United States, having given up citizenship to their other country, to anything sensitive. You have no way to know the veracity of their education or even their name. You only know you have cheap labor and a warm body for the day he shows up, because tomorrow he could take a tape backup of everything with him to China or India and you can’t do a single thing against him.
The rest of us true citizens have roots here we can’t escape the same.
US companies have too often degraded themselves into sad examples.
What Liu did was criminal, but predictable. This is what happens to companies that don’t pay severance and take “employment at will” completely literally.
A tragedy for both sides and taxpayers have to pay costs for litigating.
100%
Removing his login was the trigger that caused the issue. If he was not active in the system, it locked everyone out.
So what was the name of the company? Are they deliberately withholding that?
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