How a 'model' employee got away with outsourcing his software job to China

Bob was his company’s best software developer, got glowing performance reviews and earned more than $250,000 a year.

Then one day last spring, Bob’s employer, an American infrastructure company, thought its computer network had been attacked by a virus.

The ensuing forensic probe revealed that Bob’s software code had in fact been the handiwork of a Chinese subcontractor.

Bob was paying a Chinese firm about $50,000 a year to do his work, then spent the day surfing the web, watching cat videos and updating his Facebook page.

“This particular case was pretty unique,” computer security investigator Andrew Valentine, who helped uncover Bob’s scheme, said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail. “We thought it was actually pretty clever.”