A disgruntled developer has been sentenced to four years in prison after building a "kill switch" that locked all users out of a US firm's network the moment that his name was deleted from the company directory following his termination.

Davis Lu, a 55-year-old Chinese national residing in Houston, was convicted of "causing intentional damage to protected computers" in March, the US Department of Justice said in a press release announcing his sentencing Thursday.

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for approximately 11 years when suddenly the company reduced his responsibilities during a 2018 "realignment." Anticipating his termination was imminent, Lu began planting different forms of malicious code.

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Nvidia said there are no backdoors or kill switches in its chips, denying an accusation from the Chinese government. The company also urged policymakers to reject proposals for backdoors and kill switches.

"There are no back doors in NVIDIA chips. No kill switches. No spyware. That's not how trustworthy systems are built—and never will be," Nvidia Chief Security Officer David Reber Jr. wrote in a blog post yesterday.

The Cyberspace Administration of China last week said it held a meeting with Nvidia over "serious security issues" in the company's chips and claimed that US AI experts "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology."

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