Developer jailed for malware that took out his employer • The Register

A US court sentenced a former developer at power management biz Eaton to four years in prison after he installed malware on the company’s servers.

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 "kill switch" that would activate if the company revoked his network access.

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.

"The defendant breached his employer’s trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss