Okay, how many other Chinese nationals installed kill switches on other company networks. Just wonderin’....
“infinite loops”
So...like a Windows updated?
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.
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.
So what was the name of the company? Are they deliberately withholding that?