For developers in similar situations, where the corporate overlords make your life miserable; use dead man's triggers Instead of a simple killswitch: manually start handling certificates, introduce memory leaks that you can easily clear, have excessive disk filling logs that you can daily clear, and all kinds of other stuff that is a perpetual dumpster fire that you extinguish as part of your job. Oh, and don't forget to forget commenting and documenting. The next developer should instantly learn the pressure they have been putting on you.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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Errr
That's EXACTLY why I did that in the past. It wasn't an accident at all. Nope. It was future proofing my job. Completely intentional.
I'd like to imagine countless instances of this that we never hear about because there just isn't anything concrete to write a news article about
Well the guy from the article is named David Lu and added a function with the name IsDLEnabledinAD. That by itself deserves an article.
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(5 replies)
Dipshit. Just do bad coding and leave timebombs that could be considered an accident.
I mean, there's a reason he got fired and it wasn't because he's a genius...
Yeah, name it after the boss, not yourself!
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company ruins life of employee: stonk
employee ruin company: immediate imprisonment
edit:
Ultimately, Eaton Corp. bore substantial costs getting its network back online
actually, it did nothing to the company but cost it a few bucks. do not pass go/collect $200.
this person was not fired, he was laid off. he was not actively harming the company until the company ruined his life.
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The defendant breached his employer’s trust
The company breached employee trust when they fired a bunch of people during a "realignment".
Four years is far too long. If he had run over the CEO in the parking lot he wouldn't have gotten four years.
It's because they can quantify damages that way. Because you legally cannot put a value on the life of a "human" (still unsure if CEOs are human, but legally they still are), it's just "murder" and not "you cost us eleventy billion dollars in downtime." One is more negotiable in terms of damages than the other.
Then Ceos should be treated and charged with every crime a company commits or this is another class problem I'm going to solve. The guy who made the opiod crisis literally walked away with a billion dollar fine but should've gotten multiple live sentences for multiple murders.
Have to make an example of them lest the surfs realize they have power
*serfs but yeah
* Smerfs
Thought that didn’t look right
They're both words. Serf is the one for a person subject to someone else's rule just to live. (obvs not fully accurate definition, but dictionaries can give you the real deal)
Yea, sorry, English is my first language.
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4 YEARS?! And gaming companies can just build a kill switch into their game and get no penalty?
Tesla build them into fucking cars.
No one reviwing his code? Sounds like a timebomb in its self.
This was my first thought. Just zero code review going on? Some random server only that dude knew about? tf kind of controls these people have in place?
Oh right, none of the shit the company should have had.
Instead of jail time, the government should consider giving this guy whistleblower status and investigating the corp for negligence.
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Gotta stay "lean".
Kinda funny. 4 years seems excessive to me but what do I know.
What he did was brazen and stupid but 4 years sounds a bit excessive. Unless the journalist is under reporting what happened, he didn't do any long-term damage just probably knocked them offline for a day and required somebody to come in and manually reset the drsm account in the domain controller.
But in a fit of rage and passion he built out booby traps and put his name all over everything. He wanted them to know it was him, How do you absolutely denied himself plausible deniability.
All he had to do was pretend he was inept and replace service accounts with his own login. Push 90-day password resets on the account for 'security'. Set up a house of cards out of security certificates.
The company probably walked into that court with a technically competent team of lawyers and a bunch of expert testimony, he probably had a state defender.
Kinda heroic, ngl. I think the prison sentence is appropriate, but if I was let go after 11 years, I’d harbor fantasies of doing something similar. They’d stay fantasies, though.
Prison? For shutting down the computers? How many lives were lost because of his actions, how many were saved?
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this was stupid. A career ending move. no one’s gonna hire someone who wrote a logic bomb at their last job.
Yeah they will.
Sounds like he could have been a bit more creative in implementing this. Having something immediately traceable back to a username is no bueno.
Good. Some one should sponsor and hire this guy.
I'm curious what this crowd thinks is an appropriate punishment here. No priors, found guilty, caused some lost revenue (which I have to admit doesn't mean you actually lost revenue). So, should they even be sent to jail? House arrest? Or do we just want consistency in punishments?
He should get a corporate level penalty. He made X dollars while working for that company but did something wrong while making that money. He should have to pay back .001% of his profits as a fine and the illegal stuff he did should then be ignored/forgiven. That is what corporations get as a penalty when they break the law, I think it should be applied when they are the victims.
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