Sysadmin jailed for 30 months over failed logic bomb A former sysadmin at Medco Health Solutions, a US prescription management and health information firm, has been jailed for 30 months over a failed attempt to destroy its systems using a "logic bomb" computer virus. Yung-Hsun Lin, 51, of Montville, New Jersey, was sentenced this week after earlier pleading guilty to booby- …
He didn't get fired but still let the logic bomb activate!?
I can 'sort' of understand why a jilted employee might do something like this however stupid the action might be, but this guy's actions are practically incomprehensible.
Certainly deserves the sentence he got, which is practically a first for western justice.
he was jailed for being such a muppet to be fair. He keeps his job, so rather than back down he sets it to go off in a years time instead? Did he actually want the job? Surely if you're in a job you wouldn't want to risk it? Would have been easier to fire him, have the thing fail to go off and be rid of the guy.
Has to be kinda smart to write it though, just not smart enough to hide it or remove it for a year - why wouldn't it get noticed in a year? I know it would be a low chance but a chance nontheless, and once it goes off his sig will be all over it, when he'll probably just be shot as it'd be easier.
Try finding another job now sucker... unless he joins an anti virus/malware firm
"When the code failed to launch in April 2004 because of coding flaws, Yung-Hsun (who survived a round of lay-offs)"
So let me get this straight... when he wasn't made redundant, he didn't think to remove his bomb... what would he have done if it had gone off?
This to me shows malicious intent rather than merely the expected desire of retribution that he claimed.
He should be banged up for longer.
Not for doing it, but for doing it in such a way that 1: they found it and 2: they knew it was him.
Now, if it was the BOFH it would be different - he would have switched some inventory DB so people got the wrong drugs, particularly ones that his bosses needed/were skimming off the top.
"Try finding another job now sucker... unless he joins an anti virus/malware firm"
Erm, I doubt it. Even they wouldnt want an INCOMPETENT malware author on their books.
Sounds like he's a dick. Surely he could have hidden it better than that, and if you are going to do such a thing, you should at the very least make sure it isnt tracable back to you! Imagine using your own birthday! Use your bosses birthday, or the MD's, or the Queen's... anyones but your own! Thats what I would do.
He's stupid, and deserves prison.
> If it didn't go off, what the hell's he paying $81k in compensation for?
Removing the offensive code, and auditing the rest of the code to make sure there isn't more like it, isn't free. Nor is the hit to the firm's reputation when (potential) customers hear about what almost happened.
"If it didn't go off, what the hell's he paying $81k in compensation for?"
Probably for scrubbing the system. Once you find malware in your system, and especially once you realize it's your sysadmin who put it there, you can no longer trust the system. A that point, you must do a thorough validation of everything in the system, every file, every script line-by-line. That is most likely what the $81k was for. And considering they probably wanted/needed it done ASAP, there was probably a lot of overtime, so $81k probably isn't unreasonable.
"The data included a patient-specific drug interaction conflict database..."
Call me harsh, but I would have charged him with as many counts of attempted murder as there are potentially fatal allergies or interactions on that list.
Deleting the payroll and billing data, yes, that screws the company. It's a bit of a stretch to justify killing off the customers though, unless he's hoping for lawsuits from bereaved realtives (which, this being America, might actually be quite likely).
Just deleting data willy-nilly? How very low-rent. The trick is to introduce a small amount of random corruption (say, transposing a couple of digits in a numeric field so it looks like a keying error) slowly, over a long period, so by the time it's discovered (which will hopefully be about they time they're migrating the data to a new system altogether) it's far to late to do anything about it, and none of the audits will ever match out.
Not that I'd do anything like that.
"If it didn't go off, what the hell's he paying $81k in compensation for?
And if he can't even code file-deleting malware properly, he should have lost his job ages ago for just being crap."
They should have gotten even more, exactly because of that! Having an incompetent idiot in the payroll is surely a loss of money...
"haha - I bet it was something lame like a cron job.
Come on - I bet we have all been tempted to do that at least once in our careers? This poor guy just got busted thats all!"
Back when I was in Uni (in the dark ages) and fake 'man' page was doing the round in the Jokes newsgroup - it was for a utility called 'rr' (short for Russian Roulette). I liked it so much I implemented it in C and (as a lark) in shell-script. What the program would do when invoked was find *every* executable you had access to, pick one at random, and run it with the option string "-rf /". Bingo was when the system picked the "rm" command and you were running it as root. ^_^
No, I never released either version... but I probably still have the source code around here somwhere.
If I were IT Manager for that company, I'd want at least that just to compensate me for having to put up with the wanker during his term of employment - never mind what it'd cost to audit and clean out the system.
Like Agent Smith, I would feel "unclean" and that his mere presence had somehow tainted me. I'd want 81.2 kilobucks, three bars of disinfectant soap and a week off in which to scrub away any "moron germs" (worse than the "girl germs" we boys feared prior to the onset of puberty) I might have been exposed to by coming in contact with him.
Then I'd want to pay top dollar to the team that auditted the system - no expenses spared - then shackle him out in the car park and make him scrub the cars of those who're cleaning up his mess.
Other punishments like tattooing "fuckwit" on his forehead spring to mind but, from the sound of the bloke, it's probably aready obvious enough...
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