Engineer Sabotages Company Servers After Being Fired

A Well-Planned Revenge

Who hasn't dreamed of getting revenge on a former employer? Davis Lu, a computer engineer, made it a reality. A former employee of Eaton Corp, a company specializing in energy management, he was found guilty on March 7 by a federal jury for sabotaging the company’s servers after his termination in 2019. He had been working there since 2007 and was wary of the restructuring plans that hinted at waves of layoffs.
To prepare for this possibility, he developed a destructive script capable of deleting internal files while remaining undetectable.

A Formidable IT Trap

Davis Lu secretly developed multiple malicious scripts. One of them, called Hakai (meaning "destruction" in Japanese), was designed to intercept connections and delete files in the event of a layoff. Another, HunShui, referred to a Chinese expression describing employees who take advantage of their bosses’ absence to do nothing.

But his masterpiece was a piece of code named "IsDLEnabledinAD" (short for "Is Davis Lu Enabled in Active Directory?"). As long as his account remained active in the system, the script did nothing. But the moment he was fired on September 9, 2019, his absence triggered the IT "bomb," blocking access and paralyzing the entire company.

Between Revenge and Ideology

Davis Lu faces up to 10 years in federal prison. Eaton Corp estimates the losses at several hundred thousand dollars, while his lawyers downplay the damage to around $5,000.

His act echoes a broader trend of opposition to technology, notably in France in the 1980s with the Clodo collective (Committee for Liquidating or Diverting Computers). This anarchist group denounced the increasing computerization of labor as a tool of surveillance and exploitation.

While Davis Lu acted primarily for himself, his actions might have brought a smile to the faces of these cyber-rebels from another era.