Developer Who Hacked Former Employer’s Systems Sentenced to Prison

Davis Lu was sentenced to four years in prison for installing malicious code on employer’s systems and for deleting encrypted data.

A Chinese national was sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his former employer’s systems through malicious code.

The man, Davis Lu, 55, a legal resident of Houston, Texas, was a software engineer at the victim company, headquartered in Beachwood, Ohio, from November 2007 to October 2019.

According to court documents, Lu began sabotaging the employer’s network after his responsibilities and system access were restricted in 2018, following a corporate realignment.

By August 2019, documents presented in court show, he installed malicious code that exhausted system resources, causing crashes and preventing user logins.

The code was designed to repeatedly create Java threads without proper termination, creating infinite loops leading to server hangs or crashes.

Additionally, Lu deleted coworker profile files, and implemented a kill switch ...