A
contract programmer faces 10 years in jail for inserting a 'logic bomb' into a
spreadsheet that caused the company to keep rehiring him
- A contract programmer has pled guilty to a
federal crime, and faces up to 10 years in jail and up to a $250,000 fine.
- He had planted a "logic bomb" in a
system that caused glitches in the system he built for his client every
few years - forcing his employer to be dependent on him to fix each new
problem.
- His logic bomb was apparently discovered when the
program glitched while he was on vacation, and he was forced to give
employees the password so they could fix it.
- Read more on the Business Insider homepage.
We've heard of programmers who secretly automated their jobs, but
here's a darker tale of a contract programmer who tried to force his employer
to be dependent on him. Now, he's facing up to ten years in prison, as well as
a fine of up to $250,000.
David Tinley, 62, pleaded guilty in federal court to a
charge of intentional damage to a protected computer, the US Attorney's Office
of the Western District of Pennsylvania said in a press release.
Tinley had been hired by a US unit of Siemens, the
German-based tech conglomerate, to create custom, automated spreadsheets. The
company used these spreadsheets to manage orders for electrical equipment.
Tinley planted so-called "logic bombs" in
the spreadsheets, the government alleged. Logic bombs are bits of malicious
code that disrupt the program when specific conditions are met, like a specific
time on a specific date.
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In this case, the logic bombs were timed to go off every
few years, the government alleges, causing the spreadsheet to experience
glitches like error messages and making the on-screen buttons change sizes,
according to a report from Law360.
When the program glitched, the company would bring
Tinley back in to fix it. He fixed the system by pushing back the date the
spreadsheets would stop working again, the government said.
He was busted in 2016 when he was away on vacation and
Siemens had to put an urgent order through the system which had begun
glitching, according to the Law360 report. The circumstance reportedly forced
Tinley to share with employees his passwords that protected the system's code -
revealing the logic bomb.
Tinley's lawyers said that Tinley never made any money
by being hired to go in and fix the spreadsheets, arguing that his motivation
was to protect his proprietary work, according to Law360. Even so, prosecutors
reportedly argued that the situation met the $5,000 in damages needed to label
it a felony because Siemens spent about $42,000 on an investigation into the
damages he may have caused.
Tinley's plea included an agreement to pay restitution
for those costs, as well as forfeiting two laptops, according to Law360. That's
in addition to his sentencing, where he'll face the prospect of jail time and a
fine.
It's not unusual for programmers found guilty of
planting logic bombs to go to jail.
In 2008, a system administrator was sentenced to 30
months over his failed logic bomb at his employer Medco, after it was spun off
of Merck and he feared being laid off, the Register reported at the time. The
sysadmin pled guilty to planting the bomb, which was designed to delete a bunch
of data after he left the company. Flaws in the way it was coded kept it from
going off on time and he was caught after he tried to fix it, prosecutors
alleged.
In 2018, an Atlanta judge sentenced a database
programmer to two years in prison after he pled guilty to planting a logic bomb
in the US Army's payroll databases, ZDNet reported. He planted the bomb after his
employer lost the contract to continue managing those databases. This bomb did
go off, deleting data that prevented US Army reservists from being paid and
deployed on time. The army spent $2.6 million to investigate and repair their
systems. They did restore all the data, and the man was ordered to pay $1.5
million in restitution in addition to jail time.