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SABOTAGE: Student adds bugs to the code on purpose! Intern Gets Job at ByteDance, Sabotages Neural Network Development Project for Two Months Programmer Keyu Tian got an internship at the Chinese company ByteDance and spent two months sabotaging a neural network development project by deliberately introducing errors into the code. Because of his actions, a team of thirty developers spent 247 searching for and fixing bugs that appeared in the project. The investigation revealed that Tian: Systematically uploaded Pickle files with malicious hidden code that contained viruses and other dangerous components. This code was executed automatically and randomly, so the team could not understand why their efforts did not lead to stabilization of the project Gained access to the PyTorch library on which the projects were based and made small changes to it daily, which led to program crashes. The developers did not check the source code, which is why tasks continued to fail with errors and bugs, and all experiments brought incorrect results Created chaos with checkpoints, files that save intermediate states of neural networks during their training. He changed model parameters, interfered with training data, or deleted checkpoints, which is why the team’s work results disappeared and could not be restored Actively participated in work meetings, which allowed him to remain unnoticed. He attended every meeting to find out about the team’s plans to fix bugs, and then created new ones. The team could not understand what was happening; Tian was exposed by logs. ByteDance reported that thirty developers worked for two months without results due to the destructive actions of one person, which led to the failure of the project deadlines and the loss of customer funds After Tian was fired from ByteDance, his mentors at university did not condemn or punish him. MIRATE