A security check on a United States company has revealed one of its employees was outsourcing his work to China.
The software developer is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.
He reportedly paid a fifth of his salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.
Verizon said the company asked for an audit after it discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang to a workstation that went back months.
''Authentication was no problem,'' a spokesman for Verizon said.
''He physically FedExed his RSA (security) token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day.
All told, it looked like he ... only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $US50,000 annually."
Verizon said the employee no longer worked at the firm, which was not named.
