A 55 -year -old Chinese national has been sentenced to four -year prison and under three years of supervision, its former employer’s network has been released to vandalize with custom malware and to deploy a kilo switch, which was closed when their account was disabled.
55 -year -old Davis Lu of Houston, Texas, was convicted of deliberately damaging protected computers in March 2025. He was arrested in April 2021 to misuse his position as a software developer to execute malicious code on his employer’s computer server.
Acting Attorney General Matthew R. of Justice Department Criminal Division. Geloti said, “The defendant violated his employer’s belief using his reach and technical knowledge to vandalize the company’s network, wreaked havoc and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for an American company.”
“However, the defendant’s technical lover and subterfuse did not save him from the results of his actions.”
Court documents suggest that Lu was appointed as a software developer for anonymous company located in Ohio from November 2007 to October 2019. But after the 2018 corporate recurrence, after reducing their responsibilities and access to the system, Lu made a plan to introduce malicious codes around August 2019, resulting in the system crash and user login.
To close it, Lu is said to have created infinite loops in the source code to trigger server crash to create new Java threads without proper termination. He also removed the colleague profile files and applied a kilo switch that would lock all users when their credentials are disabled in the company’s active directory.
“The Kill Switch ‘Code – which Lu has named’ Isdlenabledinad, ‘Abbreviating’, Davis Lu is capable of active directory ‘ – was automatically active when he was kept on leave and asked to surrender his laptop on 9 September 2019, and thousands of company users influenced the world levels,” said the world level.
“Lu name other code ‘Haqai,’ a Japanese word meaning ‘destruction,’ and ‘Hunshui,’ a Chinese word meaning ‘sleep’ or ‘lethargy’.
In addition, the day the Lu was directed to return the laptop released by his company, the defendant removed the encrypted volume and tried to erase Linux directors and two additional projects. His internet search history bare the ways that he did research to increase privileges, hide procedures and remove files, which try to disrupt the company’s efforts to resolve issues.
LU’s illegal functions estimate that according to the department, the company costs hundreds of dollars in losses. The case also underlines the importance of identifying the dangers of Insider, Brett Lathraman, Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Cyber Division.
