A software engineer rigged the system to self-destruct the moment he got fired
Marco van Hurne
AI & ML advisory | Author of The Machine Learning Book of Knowledge | Building AI skills & organizations | Data Science | Data Governance | AI Compliance Officer | AI Governance
This is the kind of story that gets whispered in dimly lit bars, where you’d find people like Marc Drees . Here, war stories are traded between overworked engineers who dream of revenge but lack the spine, or the recklessness to pull it off. But the protagonist of our story, Davis Lu wasn’t one of those cowards.
No, he looked corporate America straight in its beady lil' shareholder-glazed eyes and said: “Fire me? I’ll fire back”.
(Pronounce with voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger)
You probably have heard of quiet quitting.
Yeah.
Well, this wasn’t that.
Oh?
Hell no!
This was loud, screaming, fire-in-the-building, mayhem-style quitting.
The man worked for Eaton Corp, and that’s a global corporate in power management, and they decided it was time for a little “corporate realignment”.
Now, if you’ve worked at a corporate one time of another, you know that’s the kind of word salad companies use when they’re about to yank your job out from under you and feed it to a stockholder.
But now they made a crucial miscalculation.
They messed with the wrong software engineer.
Lu had been there since 2007.
Nearly 2 decades of loyalty.
And like any seasoned IT guy, he could read between the lines when his system access started shrinking. Less permissions, more oversight, fewer responsibilities. That’s when most people start brushing up their LinkedIn profiles.
But Lu, well, he started researching how to obliterate their servers from the inside.
He played the long game.
It was smart.
Methodical.
The way that an assassin lays out his tools before a hit.
And by 2018, he had begun crafting his masterpiece. A series of code traps buried deep within the system. One to intercept logins. Another to delete files faster than a guilty politician erasing emails before a hearing (Hi @RutteMarc). He gave them poetic names like Hakai (Japanese for “destruction” or something), HunShui (Mandarin slang for, I believe, slacking off at work).
But the real showstopper. . .
A kill switch.
Not just any kill switch.
This one had a condition. A question it would ask, over and over, like a quiet, patient executioner. . .
“Is Davis Lu enabled?”
As long as the answer was “yes”, then nothing happened.
No alarms.
No sirens.
Just business as usual.
But if that answer ever changed, if the system one day said “no”, hell itself would be unleashed.
And on one day, Eaton Corp flipped the switch themselves.
They fired him.
The system checked.
“Is Davis Lu enabled?”
No.
And that’s when everything went dark. Files gone. Employees locked out. Servers in disarray. It was a digital city-wide blackout.
For a brief, shining moment, Lu had absolute, unchecked power. Until the FBI showed up, that is. Because, of course, they did. Bureaucrats always protect billionaires. Investigators followed the code trail back to Lu, tracing it to a server he had access to, which was executing the attack using, of all things, his own login credentials.
A small mistake.
Mayvbe a moment of arrogance?
Maybe even a flicker of wanting to be caught. Because let’s be honest, if he’d wanted to vanish, he probably could have.
Now, he is looking at up to 10 years in federal prison. Eaton Corp claims “hundreds of thousands in damages”. His lawyers say it was closer to $5,000. Which means, of course, the real number is somewhere between “corporate fear-mongering” and “we don’t want to admit how fragile our systems are”.
But here’s the thing. Lu wasn’t just some rogue employee throwing a tantrum. He was part of something bigger.
History is full of men and women like him.
If you like my rants and want to support me:
Have you ever seen the movie Falling Down?
Michael Douglas in Falling Down was the corporate apocalypse himself in a short-sleeved shirt. He played a laid-off defense worker who was stuck in traffic, and watching his life crumble in real time, until something inside him just . . . snaps.
He doesn’t file for unemployment.
He doesn’t write a polite LinkedIn post about “exploring new opportunities”.
No, he picks up a baseball bat and starts settling scores.
Lunch prices, gangsters, bureaucrats, he levels them all with the same dead-eyed determination. It wasn’t about crime or revenge to him. It was about a man who realized that the system never cared about him in the first place, so why should he play by its rules?
Sound familiar.
Eaton Corp thought they could cut Lu loose without consequences. But instead of a bat, he had code. Instead of smashing store windows, he smashed their entire digital infrastructure.
Douglas’ character went down in a blaze of bullets. Quite a tragic ending for a man in world that had no use for him anymore. But Lu’s destruction was quieter. No shootouts, no screaming. Just a single question buried deep in the system, waiting for its answer.
When the company said "No, you’re not enabled", the world didn’t hear gunfire though. It heard the sound of servers crashing, of executives panicking, of IT guys scrambling like rats on a sinking ship.
And there are more of ‘em out there
More workers exist in real-life who looked at the machines that were replacing them and thought, “Not today, motherf*er”. The original Luddites weren’t brain-dead brutes who were smashing looms for fun. They were highly-skilled craftsmen who saw their entire way of life being bulldozed to maximize profits.
And guess what, they were right.
The factory owners made billions.
The workers got slums.
Lu wasn’t the first.
And sure as hell, he won’t be the last.
Look at the 1960s, when American workers took hammers to computers because they saw the writing on the wall. Look at the 1980s, when a little-known French anarchist group called CLODO (yes, really) firebombed computer centers across France. Their goal wasn’t to stop progress. It was to stop who controlled progress. Their manifesto was a scathing critique of how technology was being used for mass surveillance, economic oppression, and, of course, the complete erosion of job security.
Sound familiar?
AI anyone?
They weren’t blowing things up for fun.
They had a strategy.
They introduced invisible chaos.
They claimed that the real damage wasn’t the fires. It was the bugs they planted. The errors they exploited. The little, hidden bombs that cost their employers millions, sometimes without anyone realizing what had happened.
Today, the fight is still raging. But the battlefield has changed. The Luddites had hammers. CLODO had explosives. Lu had code.
And there are more of them.
Everywhere.
Right now.
Maybe they work at your AI-startup?
Preparing for the Great AI-Reset. . .
Maybe the system glitch that cost your company millions wasn’t an accident. Maybe that unexpected software failure wasn’t incompetence. Maybe some quiet, smiling engineer has spent years planting landmines in the digital foundation of your corporation, just waiting for the day you piss them off.
Lu got caught. That’s the only difference. But the others? They’re still out there. Writing code. Finding loopholes. Laughing in the dark.
So next time, Zucky, Sam, Skum, Bozo the Benolent, when you think about “corporate realignment”, maybe, juuuust maybe, don’t f* with the engineers.
Signing off with revenge.
Marco.
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Stick around if you like what I write. If not, don’t worry, the AI already already knows you were here.
To keep you doomscrolling ??
Expert Director "Intelligence, Analytics & Big Data" at Devoteam | Innovative Tech
2 天前This is an interesting tale about the importance of software testing, of test coverage, of Cybersecurity enforcement, and of corporate culture. I would seriously question the competence of the quality assurance of this software company, or maybe they are competent but hopelessly understaffed due to budget limitations. Sounds like real life.
Adviseur ux & usability
3 天前I’m of course honored with the mention but the last time I visited a dimly lit bar you were still wearing diapers (come to think of it, maybe you still do).
AI RESET | Who Controls AI, Controls the Future
3 天前Interesting - this could turn into a movement if workers resent AI lay offs and feel nothing is being done to protect them and prepare them for what’s next