Davis Lu, a 55-year-old programmer from Houston, Texas, took revenge on his employer after he was fired and blocked the work of other employees at the company.
Davis Lu, a 55-year-old programmer from Houston, Texas, took revenge on his employer after he was fired and blocked the work of other employees at the company.
An experienced programmer who worked in the energy management department of Eaton Corporation from November 2007 to October 2019 was offended by the demotion in position, job responsibilities, and server access that the company made after restructuring, The Register writes .
In revenge, Lu wrote Java programs he called «Hakai» (from the Japanese word for «Destruction») and «Hongshui» (from the Chinese word for «Sleep»). The program would loop through threads, hogging the computer’s resources, and eventually make it impossible for people to log in and use the machine. He injected the code into one of his employer’s production systems.
After his release, on the day he had to return his corporate laptop, he deleted some of the encrypted data and attempted to erase the Linux OS directories and two code projects.
And although on October 7, 2019, Lu confessed to federal investigators about the real reasons for the problems with his former employer’s computers, but did not admit his guilt, a jury in Cleveland recently found him guilty. He now faces ten years behind bars.
