A US-based software developer outsourced his job to China spending entire working days on Reddit, eBay and Youtube, a Verizon security blog has revealed.

According to Andrew Valentine, writing on the Verizon blog, the unnamed employee, in his 40s, had a six figure salary but paid a fraction of that to a company in Shenyang, China, using an open virtual private network (VPN) connection.

The alarms were raised from the employer after anomalous activity from VPN logs, with security investigators noting that the VPN was logged in from China, yet the employee was there at his desk.

As the company had been gearing itself up towards a more telecommuting-focused workforce, developers were allowed to work from home on certain days – hence the VPN.

The VPN logs had been going to and from China on an almost daily basis, and went back at least six months. The rogue employee had physically FedExed his RSA token to China so the contractor could use his credentials.

Not surprisingly, this worried security personnel hugely.

According to Valentine, this employee’s standard work day was the following:

9:00 am – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 am – Take lunch

1:00 pm – Ebay time

2:00 – ish pm – Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4.30 pm – End of day update email to management

5:00pm – Go home

“Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area,” noted Valentine, who concluded that a more proactive log reviewing process would be needed across the board.

The employee, whose skills included a range of programming languages such as C, C++, Java and Ruby, no longer works with the company.

So what does this mean in terms of developer outsourcing? Craig Wilson of Ciklum believes it’s a question of semantics: that people should stop talking about it in the traditional sense, instead calling it ‘globalising’.

Wilson wrote in a blog post: “If organisations can globalise themselves, then they can drive their own productivity and manage their own costs. If they do that, all they are doing is augmenting their own organisation with another…to build out a distributed global organisation that drives productivity with the benefits of reduced costs and increased ability to scale in different locations.”

An amusing postscript came in the form of company appraisals whilst the employee was outsourcing his work. Valentine sums it up: “Investigators had the opportunity to read through his performance reviews…for the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks. His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion.

“Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.”