{"id":59223,"date":"2025-08-22T00:27:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T00:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/developer-jailed-for-taking-down-employers-network-with-kill-switch-malware\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T00:27:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T00:27:10","slug":"developer-jailed-for-taking-down-employers-network-with-kill-switch-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/developer-jailed-for-taking-down-employers-network-with-kill-switch-malware\/","title":{"rendered":"Developer jailed for taking down employer’s network with kill switch malware"},"content":{"rendered":"

A US court sentenced a former developer at power management biz Eaton to four years in prison after he installed malware on the company\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n

Davis Lu, 55, spent a dozen years at Eaton and rose to become a senior developer of emerging technology, before the company demoted him after restructuring. Lu unwisely responded to that setback by installing<\/a> a “kill switch” that would activate if the company revoked his network access.<\/p>\n

The package was a Java program that generated increasing numbers of non-terminating threads in an infinite loop that would eventually use enough resources to crash the server.<\/p>\n