A 55-year-old software program developer faces as much as 10 years in jail for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employer’s community, allegedly costing a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} in losses.

The US Division of Justice announced Friday that Davis Lu was convicted by a jury after “inflicting intentional injury to protected computer systems” reportedly owned by the Ohio- and Dublin-based energy administration firm Eaton Corp.

Lu had labored at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently turned disgruntled by a company “realignment” in 2018 that “decreased his obligations,” the DOJ stated.

His efforts to sabotage their community started that yr, and by the following yr, he had planted completely different types of malicious code, creating “infinite loops” that deleted coworker profile recordsdata, stopping professional logins and inflicting system crashes, the DOJ defined. Aiming to decelerate or destroy Eaton Corp.’s productiveness, Lu named these codes utilizing the Japanese phrase for destruction, “Hakai,” and the Chinese language phrase for lethargy, “HunShui,” the DOJ stated.

However maybe nothing was as damaging because the “kill change” Lu designed to close down the whole lot if he was ever terminated.

This kill change, the DOJ stated, appeared to have been created by Lu as a result of it was named “IsDLEnabledinAD,” which is an obvious abbreviation of “Is Davis Lu enabled in Energetic Listing.” It additionally “robotically activated” on the day of Lu’s termination in 2019, the DOJ stated, disrupting Eaton Corp. customers globally.