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Guy Outsources His Job to China

Fiddo

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I though this was kind of interesting-------



The Story of a Man Who Outsourced His Work to China so He Could Watch Cat Videos All Day
By Megan Rose Dickey | Business Insider – 9 hours ago



Thinkstock -
A Verizon case study recently revealed that some people will go through great lengths in order to be able to watch cat videos all day.
We first heard about it on TNW.
The study documents the scam of a developer, who is referred to as Bob. He worked at a "critical infrastructure" company in the U.S. and started outsourcing his work to China underneath his company's nose, and would only pay those people less than one fifth of his six-figure salary.
Here's how it was possible.


Bob's company had started letting employees work remotely from home on certain days, so it set up a VPN concentrator to facilitate that. The company implemented two-factor authentication for the connection, with the second factor being a physical, rotating token RSA key fob. So all Bob had to do was send the key over to China via FedEx.
The company eventually noticed strange activity in its VPN logs, so it asked Verizon for some help understanding what was going on. The logs showed that Bob was logged in from Shenyang, China, even though he was sitting at his desk.
The company initially thought there was some kind of malware routing traffic from an internal connection in China, and then back to the U.S.
But Verizon investigators quickly noticed a major red flag. The VPN connection wasn't new and had been active for at least six months.
So they zeroed in on Bob himself, and took a forensic image of Bob's computer to recover as many files as possible and check for signs of malware.
What they ended up finding were hundreds of PDF invoices from a third-party contractor in Shenyang, China.



A look at his browsing history revealed what his typical work day consisted of:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
2:00ish p.m. – Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
5:00 p.m. – Go home.



So while workers in China were doing Bob's job for him, Bob was sitting back, relaxing, watching cat videos, and earning "several hundred thousand dollars" a year.
 

Rubberj00

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Cat videos? Is this a nice way of saying porn or am i completely off track here.. slightly confused!
 

DRBAFC

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No mention of cat videos anywhere.

Bob has excellent managerial skills and probably pays a better wage to the Chinese workers than most big shot CEO's do.
 

Esprit

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Couldnt Bob have just set up a VPN at home, for the chinese to connect to, and then in turn he could use the keyfob to connect to the Verizon VPN? That way there would have been no direct connection from china.
 

Drummania

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Most outsourcing operations fails miserably but this guy clearly is a success!
 

Bonesey

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Awesome. Just awesome. Your obviously not Reddit readers if you don't spend a portion of your working day watching cat videos.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
 

trailboss99

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Exactly.


However, no one has noticed the worrying bit of this?

But Verizon investigators quickly noticed a major red flag. The VPN connection wasn't new and had been active for at least six months.
So they zeroed in on Bob himself, and took a forensic image of Bob's computer to recover as many files as possible and check for signs of malware.

Since when do Verizon have a right to do a snapshot of Bob's home PC??????
 

KBH

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Could have been Bob's home PC that he was supposed to be working from was a laptop that belonged to Verizon.
 

dev1ant

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Could have been Bob's home PC that he was supposed to be working from was a laptop that belonged to Verizon.

This, or a desktop that was provided by Verizon specifically for work only purposes.
 

smokiedabong

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Awesome. Just awesome. Your obviously not Reddit readers if you don't spend a portion of your working day watching cat videos.

I read Reddit all day at work and I hate cat videos

Since when do Verizon have a right to do a snapshot of Bob's home PC??????

Maybe it was the IT department after they got a security warning from Verizon?
My company also works with Verizon and if I get a notice of unusual activity I can go in and monitor any computer in the company to trace the problem. If the situation requires it I can make complete images of remote PCs as all the data and network traffic on a company laptop is company owned. Just recently I've made snapshots of a bunch of home users as they were part of some litigation.
 

trailboss99

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Maybe it was the IT department after they got a security warning from Verizon?
My company also works with Verizon and if I get a notice of unusual activity I can go in and monitor any computer in the company to trace the problem. If the situation requires it I can make complete images of remote PCs as all the data and network traffic on a company laptop is company owned. Just recently I've made snapshots of a bunch of home users as they were part of some litigation.

Well, that's not what it says is it? It says Verizon did.
 

smokiedabong

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Well, that's not what it says is it? It says Verizon did.

In that segment of the article there are two parties involved "the company" and "Verizon" and it doesn't clearly states that Verizon did the snapshot either. They may have or they may have not. If Verizon was contracted by that company to be their IT network department they could have been granted permission to do snapshots of company laptops.