A Programmer Planted A Logic Bomb To Make His Company Keep Hiring Him

There have been many stories about programmers secretly automating their occupations; however, this article will tell a darker story about a contract programmer making every effort to compel the manager to depend on him. He's now facing 10-year imprisonment and up to Rs 1.78 crore fine.

According to a press release, the US Attorney's Office of the Western District of Pennsylvania, in federal court, ruled that the 62-year-old David Tinley was guilty of intentionally damaging a protected computer.

The American branch of Siemens, a technology conglomerate whose headquarters is located in Germany, had signed the labor contract with Tinley about making automated, custom spreadsheets. These spreadsheets would be used by the company for order management for electrical devices.

According to the government, in the spreadsheets, he planted "logic bombs." These are bits of harmful code that cause a disruption in the program under a specific set of conditions, including a particular time on a particular day.

As claimed by Law360 report, the government alleges that Tinley set the logic bombs to disrupt the program every few years, which caused different kinds of bugs, such as the difference in the size of on-screen buttons or error messages.

Once there was a bug, the firm would ask Tinley to come back and fix the program. He was said to repair the program by only resetting the date when those logic bombs would work again.

Law360 reported that, in 2016, Tinley was busted while he went on a vacation trip. At the same time, the company had to put an order through the system right away and it had started glitching. In that situation, Tinley was reportedly compelled to let his colleagues know about his passwords protecting the code of the program, which meant those logic bombs would be revealed.

Law360 also mentioned claims made by the lawyers of Tinley, who argued that Tinley had never earned any financial benefits from his fixing the problem. The lawyers also added that all he did was just to secure his proprietary work. However, according to prosecutors, as Siemens had used almost Rs 30 lakh to investigate the possible destructions made by Tinley, he was subject to a felony imposing a penalty over those causing Rs 356,467 damages.

In his plea, according to Law360, Tinley expressed that he promised to make compensation for all those costs and forfeit two computer devices. This is an addition to the likelihood that he will suffer from a sentence in prison with a financial penalty. Incidents like this are more common than you may expect.

According to a 2008 report from Register, a system administrator at Medco was imprisoned for 30 months for his unsuccessful logic bomb, after his company separated from the original Merck and he was afraid of being fired. This system administrator confessed his guilt of planting the logic bomb, whose design was deleting a bunch of information after he was laid off. There were flaws making the code unable to work on time. After this admin made an effort to repair the logic bomb, he was caught, according to prosecutors’ allegation.

Last year, ZDN also reported a situation in which a database programmer was imprisoned by an Atlanta judge for two years after confessing his guilt of planting a logic bomb in payroll databases of the US Army. After his company was unable to maintain the contract that allowed him to control all the data, the programmer planted the logic bomb. This code was successful as it deleted data, inhibiting the reservists of the army being deployed and paid at the correct times. It took the US Army $2.6 million to make an investigation and fix the programs. In the end, the army did restore all the information, and in addition to a sentence in prison, the programmer had to pay $1.5 million as compensation.