A software developer has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his ex-employer’s Windows network with custom malware and a kill switch that locked out employees when his account was disabled.
Davis Lu, 55, a Chinese national living legally in Houston, worked for an Ohio-based company, reportedly Eaton Corporation, from 2007 until his termination in 2019.
After a corporate restructuring and subsequent demotion in 2018, the DOJ says that Lu retaliated by embedding malicious code throughout the company’s Windows production environment.
The malicious code included an infinite Java thread loop designed to overwhelm servers and crash production systems.
Lu also created a kill switch named “IsDLEnabledinAD” (“Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory”) that would automatically lock all users out of their accounts if his account was disabled in Active Directory.