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We have heard about programmers who have secretly automated their work, but here is the darker story of a contract programmer who tried to force his employer to depend on him. He is now at risk of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $ 250,000.
David Tinley, 62, pleaded guilty in federal court to intentionally damaging a protected computer, the Western District of Pennsylvania's US Attorney's Office said in a statement.
Tinley was hired by an American unit from Siemens, a technology conglomerate based in Germany, to create custom automated spreadsheets. The company used these spreadsheets to manage electrical equipment orders.
Tinley has planted "logic bombs" in the worksheets, according to the government. Logic bombs are fragments of malicious code that disrupt the program when specific conditions are met, such as a specific time on a given date.
Read more: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told a cute joke about working with Bill Gates.
In this case, the logic bombs had to be triggered every few years, the government explained, which caused malfunctions in the spreadsheet, such as error messages and changes in the size of the buttons on the screen. 39; screen, according to a report from Law360.
When the program became ineffective, the company brought Tinley back to fix it. He corrected the system by pushing back the date on which the spreadsheets would stop working, the government said.
According to the Law360 report, he had been arrested in 2016 while he was on vacation and Siemens had to place an urgent order via the system. Circumstances would have forced Tinley to share with his employees his pbadwords protecting the system code, revealing the logic bomb.
Tinley's lawyers said he had never made money by being hired to repair the spreadsheets, claiming that his motivation was to protect his exclusive work, according to Law360. Even in this case, prosecutors argued that the situation had reached the $ 5,000 of damages needed to qualify this crime as a crime, since Siemens had spent about $ 42,000 for an injury investigation that he could have caused, reported law 360.
Tinley's plea included a compensation agreement for these charges and the loss of two laptops, in accordance with Law 360. This adds to his sentence, where he will face a prison sentence and a fine.
It is not uncommon for programmers convicted of laying logic bombs to be imprisoned.
In 2008, a system administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison for committing a logic bomb at his employer Medco after the Merck split. He feared to be fired, reported The Register at the time. The system administrator pleaded guilty to placing the bomb in order to delete a series of data after he left the company. The loopholes in the way he was coded prevented him from disappearing on time, and he was caught after trying to fix it, according to prosecutors.
In 2018, an Atlanta judge sentenced a database programmer to two years in jail after pleading guilty to placing a logic bomb in the payroll databases of the United States. US military, ZDNet reported. He planted the bomb after his employer lost the contract to manage these databases. This bomb exploded, removing data that prevented US Army reservists from being paid and deployed on time. The military spent $ 2.6 million to investigate and repair their systems. They restored all the data, and the man was sentenced to pay $ 1.5 million in restitution and a jail sentence.
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