2.5 Years in Jail for Planting 'Logic Bomb'

cweditor writes "A former Medco Health systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution for planting a logic bomb on a network that held customer health care information. The code was designed to delete almost all information on about 70 company servers. This may be longest federal prison sentence for trying to damage a corporate computer system, although Yung-Hsun Lin faced a maximum of 10 years." How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Comments

Do they give Nobel prizes for

[Trigun]

Attempted Physics? I think not!

Re:Do they give Nobel prizes for

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but you still go to jail for attempted murder.

Re:Do they give Nobel prizes for

[DeVilla]

I think I've answered one like this before. I don't know about attempted Physics, but I'm pretty sure they've given Prizes for attempted Peace in the Middle East and attempted Peace with the IRA. As far as this guy goes, if he set the 'clock' on a type of 'time bomb', then I think it's safe to say he did it. His part was done and it was just a waiting game. It's kind of like pushig the lever down on the toaster. I may not have toast yet, but I'm not going to have to do anything more to have toast. It's not like there is anything more I need to do to prove I'm going to make toast.

Re:Do they give Nobel prizes for

[trburkholder]

Get the quote right: "Attempted murder, now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"

Re:Do they give Nobel prizes for

[INT_QRK]

He got off lightly in my judgment. Patient records these days have greater implications than just billing. More and more medical systems provide cross-database functionality with real health impacts, such as drug interaction, allergy alerts, diagnostics, etc. This idiot's acts may very well have had the potential for harming patients. Judge Bean says hang 'em high!

Re:Do they give Nobel prizes for

[Trigun]

Oh boo hoo. Next time I'll just go with the standard "Frist Psot!!!111!!!~Eleven!"

Let me guess

[Daimanta]

They replaced everyones desktops with a picture of Xeno's paradox?

Re:Let me guess

[squidfood]

'Logic Bomb'

Anyone else think of Dark Star? Or would that be 'Logical Bomb'?

Re:Let me guess

[Opie812]

Nope. Just you.

Re:Let me guess

[HUADPE]

Xeno's paradox is easily disproved in three steps.

1: Get crossbow and bolt. 2: Aim crossbow at Xeno. 3: Fire. If the bolt moves to Xeno, then it is proved that movement is possible. Also, Xeno will be dead. Win win situation.

Re:Let me guess

[dryueh]

Xeno will be dead. Win win situation. Xeno IS dead, you insensitive clod.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It took some time for that information to reach his frame of reference you insensitive clod. ;)

Re:Let me guess

[LeafOnTheWind]

I may have a simpler way:
distance remaining (s) = 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 ... a_n = 1/2^(n-1)
lim_(n->infinity) 1/2^(n-1) = 0.

So, the object reaches its target :)

Re:Let me guess

[PPH]

Better known as the progress bar on a Vista CD write application.

Re:Let me guess

[myowntrueself]

Zeno's paradoxes were actually a set of paradoxes designed to fit together in such a way as to prove that reality doesn't exist, at least not in the way that it is (was) commonly assumed to exist.

Sure, its obvious that the arrow reaches its target.

What Zeno did was to produce a set of arguments to demonstrate that time and space can be neither discrete nor continuous.

If time and space are not discrete and also are not continuous, what else can they be?

According to the reasoning of his day these were the only two *possible* choices.

If you could rule *both* of them out then reality has to be *completely* different from what it was assumed to be.

That was the purpose of Zeno's paradoxes; to turn things on their heads and to get people to think outside the box.

Re:Let me guess

[Bu11etmagnet]

Xeno IS dead, you insensitive clod.

Good riddance. I hated those jumping puzzles at the end of Half-Life.

Re:Let me guess

[calculadoru]

Hey, were he alive, this guy would probably want to sue for copyright infringement.
Just sayin'.

meatspace

[qwertphobia]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Only when disgruntled sysadmins start damaging meatspace. Really, it's possible, but only then will people start waking up.

Re:meatspace

[ScentCone]

Only when disgruntled sysadmins start damaging meatspace.

When someone blows away the contents of 70 servers, they ARE damaging meatspace. Real time, stress, cash, and possibly very serious side-effects to real meat can result (especially in health care operations and record keeping). We just need more people to be aware of how the things that they pay money for, and get or don't get with the fruits of their labor, are diminished by the acts of crooks and vandals of ALL sorts. Inside IT jackasses, retail store theft/shrinkage - all of that. People don't want to think about it, not least because it's a reminder that there really are just plain bad people out there, and that they cost us all a little (and sometimes not so little) piece of our lives. I don't know about you, but the only life I'm getting is in meatspace. Chip away at that - however indirectly - and you're messing with the only thing that matters. And there are thousands of people chipping away, every day. Disgruntled IT guys aren't any different than disgruntled anyone else, but they can cause damage in unique ways, given their reach and the subtlety of their line of work.

Re:meatspace

[daeg]

Fear and appease the mighty systems administrator, lest he make your CD tray eject at random and hit thy knee, causing grave distress and injury.

Re:meatspace

[CFTM]

Right but the question was "When will going sysadmin replace going postal" and the answer is never because they are fundamentally different entities. Yes, this is a total ass clown thing to do and yes it does lots of REAL damage. People do not end up dead with bullet holes in them; people may be dead because some health services group isn't able to pull their record and gives them medication that they are allergic to but that won't capture the imagination of the American public. Walking in to a public building and opening up with fire arms, has, unfortunately caught the imagination of our society.

Apples and oranges...

Re:meatspace

[zehaeva]

All this talk of meat is making me thirsty

Re:meatspace

[beckerist]

Yep. Also a little thing known as privacy laws that make it a TINY bit illegal to mess around with health care records.

Re:meatspace

[SharpFang]

Actually, it may get much more spectacular than wrong medications served to patients.

Flight control hacking
Railway tracks control
Time bombs in firmware of cars (in all cars of given model, after given date, once the speed is over 60mph, disable brakes and force power steering all the way to the left)
huge chemical industry factory manufacturing systems
municipal gas networks
oil pipelines control
Nuclear power plants
halon dump release system firmware
top secret strategical plans posted to usenet
military devices control systems

Re:meatspace

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone blows away the contents of 70 servers, they ARE damaging meatspace. Real time, stress, cash, and possibly very serious side-effects to real meat can result (especially in health care operations and record keeping).

I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored. Particularly in the post-HIPAA world of data driven health care. Granted, it may take a little time and a little expense to hit the undo button, but I think the punishment does not fit the crime.

To think eighty grand and three years in a dark cell is appropriate smacks of proud, tin badge-wearing member of a modern "kill 'em all" lynchmob.

Re:meatspace

[bkr1_2k]

As opposed to shooting them (going postal), which is okay?

Re:meatspace

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you have my stapler.

Re:meatspace

[bkr1_2k]

I'll remind you of that when someone you love dies because their health records are inaccessible due to some asshat fucking up the servers.

Manslaughter charges bring a whole lot more than a couple of years. As does attempted murder, and the argument (for better or worse) can be made for either of those charges. I think 30 months is reasonable to make the person very aware of the potential damage he could have done to real people, not just data, without being overly oppressive.

Re:meatspace

[ScentCone]

There are data backups which can be restored

If you trash 70 servers, you are seriously down and out of business for a while. And someone with that degree of access may also have corrupted data that goes way back into your backups. You don't know. You have to check. And for many businesses, being down and out for, say, 48 hours... it's a death sentence. Just-in-time manufacturers, retailers... they can wind up in contract breach, lose customers... if that happened to some retailers during the peak of their holiday sales season, it would bankrupt them. And when an IT person who KNOWS that chooses to shut down a business - and possibly kill it, costing everyone who works there their jobs, and everyone who invested in the business their money, and every customer who uses the vendor a resource - then that's not a bit different than torching their warehouse or otherwise acting to ruin the operations and the people who depend on it and have worked to build it. Three years in prison for deliberately, methodically attempting to ruin other people's lives and livehihood? You think that's too much? Your moral compass is way off, friend.

Re:meatspace

[qwertphobia]

• Flight control hacking
• Railway tracks control
• Time bombs in firmware of cars (in all cars of given model, after given date, once the speed is over
• 60mph, disable brakes and force power steering all the way to the left)
• huge chemical industry factory manufacturing systems
• municipal gas networks
• oil pipelines control
• Nuclear power plants
• halon dump release system firmware
• top secret strategical plans posted to usenet
• military devices control systems

Now that's what I'm talking about! Don't forget about life-support systems, manufacturing systems (remember the Tylenol scare?) That got folks thinking! What's a little SSAN leak, compared to that, when we talk about generating terror?

We are the minority who understand the damage of personally-identifiable information leaks. A single incident can cost millions, most here know that already.

The real panic for the public happens only when individuals fear for their lives.

Re:meatspace

[nickyj]

Well, I gotta tell you: I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you... or maybe you shouldn't bring me every little piece of trash you happen to pick up.

Courtesy of Fight Club movie.

Re:meatspace

[JustOK]

I'll remind you of that when someone you love dies because their health records are inaccessible due to some asshat fucking up the servers.

And if a doctor says fuckit and goes ahead with a life saving procedure because their health records are inaccessible due to some asshat fucking up the servers which would have denied the procedure?

Re:meatspace

[Viceroy Potatohead]

Apples and oranges... Correction: Apples and cheetoes...

Re:meatspace

[kdemetter]

While i do think health care is a matter of great importance , and so a major punishment is in order , a charge of murder seems a bit ridiculous .

You might just as well charge him with genocide or crimes against humanity.

There are more important lessons to be learnt here . Like , who could this have happend ? Was the security lacking ? Was the person given to much trust ? And more to the point , how can we prevent this from happening ever again.

Re:meatspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a sec, does that mean that Bill Gate's monopoly tactics aren't just as evil as murder?

Re:meatspace

[Cyberax]

It was actually done with natural gas pipeline (resulting in biggest non-nuclear explosion): http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm

Re:meatspace

[MillionthMonkey]

I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored.

As opposed to the punishments given out for possession of marijuana. At least there, the damage is irreversible. Once that doob is burned up, you can't smoke it anymore!

Re:meatspace

[Sorthum]

What people are missing is that this guy was the systems administrator-- he was the gatekeeper, in a position of trust.

It's one thing to walk in off the street and steal a candy-bar, it's quite another for the guy behind the counter to take money out of the till. I think the sentence is appropriate for the breach of trust that the asshat committed...

Re:meatspace

[ashitaka]

The fear is already there.

How is the average sysadmin treated when a company decides to terminate them, even if it is an amicable separation?

Frog march to the door, no access to any machine, locks, passwords and combinations changed immediately.

All on the assumption that this person, because of their knowledge, is going to do physical or logical damage to the company systems. That is, on the assumption that they are already a psychopathic criminal with no sense of responsibility or morals.

Re:meatspace

[StarvingSE]

What I want to know is, where are the backups?

If one person is able to permanently destroy records like that with no chance to restore them, then that is the fault of their IT department. Disks are cheap, and we pay through the nose for health care, so there should be no excuses.

Re:meatspace

[Deagol]

How can they be more private than "deleted"?

Re:meatspace

[COMON$]

There was already a term for this a long time ago, they were called timebombs. Havent heard of one for a while though, not since the 90s. These were scripts that ran on a schedule that had to be updated by the disgruntled employee. If the script was not updated one day the script would go through and fubar the system. However Devs were the funny ones here. I guess it was just a matter of time before a sysadmin script kiddie did it.

Re:meatspace

[jafac]

. . . I dunno, shitheads like Jim Cramer confirm that our entire economic system is based on fraud (http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/did-jim-cramer-cross-the-line/) and he's got a TV show. Not sure I'm willing to make comparisons about moral compasses between logic-bombs and guys who walk into shopping malls with shotguns - when the real nasty motherfuckers who destroy American Families by the THOUSANDS are the guys in immaculate pressed suits reading the Op Ed column of the Wall Street Journal before dialing up their broker in the morning. The REAL monsters, who cheer with glee; "burn, baby, burn!" as a brushfire takes out power lines in California, so they can get a higher percentage deal in brokering electricity.

Talk about fucked-up moral compasses.

If those assholes didn't exist, I'd bet the shopping-mall shotgunners, and disgruntled IT workers would be a lot less likely to be doing what they're doing.

Re:meatspace

[Oligonicella]

Oh, bullshit. Having one set of asshats does not beget the second set of asshats.

Re:meatspace

[Anonymous Coward]

So you'd think that companies would try to increase the happiness and reduce the stress level of these critical employees: hire more and pay them more. Give them more control over their workflow and more say in policy so that they don't feel alienated and uninvested.

But they don't. What they do instead is implement hasher security protocols intended to prevent the employees from going postal. In the process spending as much, if not more than they would have making them happy. And stressing them further.

Modern management practices are astoundingly fascist, and saying "it's the same everywhere" is no excuse. It should be cause for alarm.

My sympathy is with the guy who tried to crash them. If there is one single person in an organization that gets routinely shit on, crash the whole thing. Screw 'em.

Re:meatspace

[Brad Eleven]

Depending on 70 servers to support a business--health care or otherwise--and presuming that someone will simply support them is worse than presuming that your car will simply work if your maintenance is limited to keeping gas in the tank. Worse yet, most of those who employ systems support personnel for important systems tend to treat them like replaceable parts. I am presently engaged in a surreal conversation with a group of people who express shock and dismay that the previous sysadmins here didn't document their procedures--so now there is no one to set up the 20-odd people they've just hired for the expensive and vital business application for which they are responsible. After three meetings, they seem ready to move from denial to anger and bargaining. I doubt that they'll ever consider the management who keep turning over their systems staff to save a little money in the short term. I'm wondering how to break it to them that I'll be out of here before Q2 arrives.

Sure, there are idiot sysadmins out there who think that the job is all online. It's not: it includes a lot of clerical work, from recording serial numbers to negotiating maintenance agreements. On top of that, there are myriad fools who think it's easy, and more than a few who think it's cute to bash the profession.

Further, it's not the kind of job you can just leave at the office. Even if you're not on call--which you kind of are all the time--the problems you're solving tend to stay with you. Conversely, this defines the personality of the career sysadmin: We don't like to let go of unsolved problems.

Developers know very well that software is never perfected--it's just abandoned. Consider that systems software is no different.

IMHO, the penalty we're discussing was handed out by the same type of cluelessly fearful magistrate who thinks s/he can "send a message to hackers everywhere." I presume that most of us here feel the same mix of superiority and dread that the technology we're familiar with--earn our livings with--is far beyond the scope of the law of the land.

On the bright side, systems administration can be awesomely satisfying. You get the chance to save the day, sometimes with a bit of trivial knowledge. You can feel secure in the knowledge that you are a member of a group so elite that there is no training for what you do. It was a sysadmin who figured out that broken computer in the Apollo 13 command module was exactly the same as the intact one in the Lunar Excursion Module.

Consider that systems administrators are only contacted when something is broken, or needs improvement. Try phoning your sysadmin to tell him/her that things are running smoothly, and that you appreciate glad for what s/he does every day and night.

Re:meatspace

[jandrese]

My guess is that they have backups, but it would have taken a considerable amount of time to restore 70 servers, and there's a nonzero chance that the backups for at least a few of them were broken.

Re:meatspace

[techno-vampire]

(in all cars of given model, after given date, once the speed is over 60mph, disable brakes and force power steering all the way to the left)

Oh, come on, now. Everybody knows that the right speed to have things activate is 88 mph! Gotta keep your nerd cred up, man!

Re:meatspace

[SharpFang]

I picked the speed at which things get killed, and is rather common to reach, for maximizing the yield.

Re:meatspace

[ScentCone]

Modern management practices are astoundingly fascist

You must be referring to the book burnings? You know, the fascist book burnings that destroyed all of the dictionaries and history books that might have given you a clue as to what that word actually means? How embarassing.

My sympathy is with the guy who tried to crash them. If there is one single person in an organization that gets routinely shit on, crash the whole thing. Screw 'em.

Because, you certainly wouldn't want to just go get a different job or anything like that.

Re:meatspace

[darkshadow]

The logic-bomb code could have been included in a backups, so until they figured out what the problem was, it would keep bombing as soon as they restored the servers.

Re:meatspace

[Copid]

I just cannot agree with 3 years of federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. There are data backups which can be restored. Particularly in the post-HIPAA world of data driven health care. Granted, it may take a little time and a little expense to hit the undo button, but I think the punishment does not fit the crime.

So, is there an amount of financial damage that you think warrants a 2.5 year prison sentence? If there is, what number are you thinking?

Given that this probably involved significant expense and was done with malice, I don't think that 3 years is unreasonable. Accounting for the cost, the lack of meaningful mitigating circumstances, and the fact that it was done with intent to cause significant damage to a lot of people, what's an appropriate sentence that provides both punishment and deterrence?

Re:meatspace

[Mister Whirly]

But did you manually install the large servo motors that make automatically turning the wheel possible? Disabling the ABS, probably, disabling manual braking and turning the wheel? Doubtful. And why not just peg the accelerator to wide open? Maximize the damage!

Re:meatspace

[Cairnarvon]

And if one of the people killed in a city-wide killing spree would have turned out to be the next Hitler?

Re:meatspace

[kurzweilfreak]

That actually sounds more like a Dead man's switch than a time-bomb.

Re:meatspace

[VAXcat]

In the mid 70s, a disgruntled employee at a newspaper in Louisiana got pissed off and went in the sserver room and killed a PDP-11/70 (a largish expensive system at the time) with a handgun. One of the Digital technicicians who worked on the fixup showed me a picture of the lights & switches front panel, with three bullet holes in it...so there's already been sysadmin meatspace violence, although it was directed at a machine and not a person.

Re:meatspace

[AgentSmith]

Anonymous Coward said-
My sympathy is with the guy who tried to crash them. If there is one single person in an organization that gets routinely shit on, crash the whole thing. Screw 'em.

I'm a sysadmin, but I also use the Medco service. SCREW YOU!

Where I work, I'm also stressed out and disgruntled. You don't see me ripping everything to the ground to get back
at a few people. Especially when my actions could cause people to possibly die.

It's like the asswipe who did the school shootings at Virginia Tech.
Severe mental instability and poor impulse control. 3 years in Fed prison? He got off light.

There has to be a better way to get out your frustrations and stress. Mebbe post about Medco on /.?

Re:meatspace

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no .... you need to have deactivated the abs system to 2 rear wheels, and the right front, this way you can activate the left front to slam into everyone....

Re:meatspace

[celle]

Government and corporations do it everyday, sometimes to whole countries, on an ongoing basis. Intentionally which is often or unintentionally, ruining people seems to be one of the best things we do in America. We're certainly the fastest and most painstakingly methodical, ok brutal, about it. If you need proof just look at iraq, iran, enron, world.com, contract corps in iraq, many of the bank failures of the last twenty years, etc, etc. And when the figureheads, you know "sacrificial lambs", do get caught they give "slap on the wrist sentences" and they don't go after all the rest involved that were guilty. Often those who got away committed worse crimes.

Re:meatspace

[KudyardRipling]

Godwin's Law Thread killed.

Re:meatspace

[bkr1_2k]

"While i do think health care is a matter of great importance , and so a major punishment is in order , a charge of murder seems a bit ridiculous ."

No doubt, I agree with you entirely. I was just saying that the argument could be made by some DA to charge him with something as ridiculous as that.

I think you're right, there are more important lessons to be learned, at a systemic level, but for the person charged, I think it was an appropriate penalty. Screwing with people's lives (literally) is not to be taken lightly.

Re:meatspace

[bkr1_2k]

Exactly my point, though you said it better. The penalty is just, not only because of the potential damage, but because it was a deliberate violation of trust from the system that is intended to help prevent this sort of activity.

Re:meatspace

[a_nonamiss]

I once worked at a place with full control of the back-end network and software for both Visa and MasterCard's network. We didn't have the ability to manipulate the data in any way, but we could have shut it down entirely. Imagine the damage a disgruntled employee could do if the attack was timed just right.

Re:meatspace

[Samizdata]

Funny.

When I left an admin job, I got the frog march without even being able to clear my desk. In fact, they wouldn't even let my (now) ex-wife to get my personal belongings for the next two weeks. They also quizzed ex-coworkers who knew me well as to whether or not I would sabotage anything.

However, for the next couple of months, I randomly checked and found the modem on my desk for remote dial in was still active, as was the software, and even the password was unchanged.

Then it gets better.

This place went through a new admin about every three to six months (the boss, the head of accounting, was abysmal and I was told several times by coworkers that I had good grounds for a harassment suit), and my replacement, upon his termination, cordially requested to retrieve some files from the server. In doing so, he deleted 1.5 of 2 server volumes while the head of accounting stood right behind him.

However, thanks to the foresight and hard work of some completely unknown prior admin (hint hint), an excellent backup strategy was in place and they were down less than 12 hours.

Re:meatspace

[SharpFang]

You'd have to wrestle against the power steering with the wheel (and changing the direction randomly you throw them off-guard). Manual brakes might work, but without ABS. Accelerator to the bottom - hell, yes, but starting from a good speed.

Re:meatspace

[bhtooefr]

It looks... intentional... though.

Godwin's Law has an exception for intentional invocations of Godwin's Law. ;)

Re:meatspace

[quanticle]

Also, don't forget about the fact that the disgruntled sysadmin could easily have corrupted the backups as well, depending on how long ago he wrote this logic bomb. Even if he hadn't done anything to the backups, the fact that he attacked the production data means that he could have attacked the backups as well, so the company would have had to go over the backups with a fine-toothed comb.

Well..

[Killjoy_NL]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Maybe then they'll fear us MWUAHAHAHAHAHHAA :D

Re:Well..

[somersault]

It wouldn't take much to make the average user fear you beyond pretending (or actually doing so I guess) you've recorded their bank details and stuff like that. Quite why you want your users to fear you, I don't know :P

Re:Well..

[Killjoy_NL]

The feeling of impending doom counts for a lot when I take over the world in a few years :)

Re:Well..

[FredFredrickson]

Remember when Stewie was cool and just wanted to take over the world?

Now he's just gay.

And I couldn't stretch anything, my bad. Sorry guys. Back on topic. 2.5 years is pretty short in my opinion. Imagine if 10 years ago you broke into a doc's office and shredded all their paper records. I don't feel that'd go over well...

Re:Well..

[stranger_to_himself]

Imagine if 10 years ago you broke into a doc's office and shredded all their paper records. I don't feel that'd go over well...

I think in the UK right now that'd get you some kind of public service medal.

Re:Well..

[somersault]

Less talk, more action! As a fellow sysadmin I hope I'll see some benefit out of this?

Re:Well..

[Alioth]

I am a post office system administrator. Double power!

Re:Well..

[soulsteal]

I am a post office system administrator. Double power!

More like quad damage!

Re:Well..

[Pharmboy]

Quite why you want your users to fear you, I don't know :P

Fear is a good tool to keep users from doing dumb things. They keep downloading "apps" when they look at porn at the office? Installing games with spyware? Let it crash, be down for two days, give reason as "spyware from downloading porn" if their boss asks. Nothing like good old fashioned fear to reduce the IT workload. Otherwise, users don't care because if it crashes, it only causes extra work for you, not them.

Re:Well..

[somersault]

Unfortunately basically one of the only people computer illiterate enough to install spyware on their machine is one of the MDs here. I don't particularly want to get fired or switch jobs, so I tend to just let him fuck things up and let him stew in his own mess after explaining that viruses have screwed up his system - again. I guess that does end up with him fearing me a little. Teehee. I have considered locking down his privileges but I dont want him phoning me up every 2 days asking why he can't install VirusExplorerNukembotForeverPart2.5 . I sometimes wonder how many people are leeching off of his credit card.. he's pretty smart as far as being an engineer goes, but for some reason is one of those people who just doesn't get it when it comes to computers and browsing safely..

Re:Well..

[fishbowl]

Explain it to your MD in terms of HIPAA and the risk that "spyware" poses to his license to practice medicine.

In fact, it is a crime NOT to have this talk with him or her.

Re:Well..

[somersault]

Uh.. I meant Managing Director. Over here our general doctors are called GPs (General Practitioners), sorry for the confusion! :p

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish! It would help cut down on those stupid calls we get from management and lusers, not to mention those very odd requests which never fail to defy logic. (and sometimes the laws of physics!)

Yeah

[suso]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Hmmm, let's just get through today and I'll get back to you.

Re:Yeah

[suso]

Actually, I think its time for a Seinfeld reference. Anyone want to make one? I'm too disgruntled to think.

Disgruntled sysadmins?

[morgan_greywolf]

Ehm, I don't think the disgruntled sysadmin will ever really enter the zeitgeist. If a company has good IT policies and practices in place, the disgruntled sysadmin really isn't that big of a problem.

In my mind, this means that you should always have more than one admin, never giving anybody absolute authority over ALL systems. With offsite backups and redundant systems, the damage any single admin could do would be minimal. Maybe costly in terms of downtime, but nothing that's going to grind your business to a halt. Just as in government, there needs to be checks and balances. Giving a single admin too much power is a very bad idea.

What I want to know is: Why would a sysadmin do things like planting a logic bomb anyway? I mean, we're talking about your PROFESSIONAL REPUTATION here. This guy's never gonna work in IT again.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[hal9000(jr)]

Just as in government, there needs to be checks and balances. Giving a single admin too much power is a very bad idea.

Your plan sounds good in theory, but unfortunately, it rarely works in practice. Distinct separation of duties and powers requires a great deal of discipline on the organization. It took an act of congress to force get public companies, and in particular, the executive board, to take responsibility over accounting practices.

Besides, little ot todays software lets you seperate duties in a meaningful way or to require double authorization for critical actions.

2 1/2 years is a light sentence compared to the damage this guy could do. Thankfully, most sysadmins are honest ethical people.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

For big business, that's fine. Most small businesses are lucky to have a single full-time IT person, and redundant systems just aren't going to happen. A week's downtime without customer records for billing, etc., while servers get rebuilt and data restored could kill them.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[nighty5]

The problem is, the common threat for most organisations is that an employee only needs full access to only one or a couple of critical assets, not all systems.

I've been in security for over 10 years and I tell you know, if you have an employee with enough access and dedication to bring down the company down to its knees, they will probably succeed.

IT policies and practices won't save a company against criminal activity, the law handles that just fine.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[jollyreaper]

In my mind, this means that you should always have more than one admin, never giving anybody absolute authority over ALL systems. With offsite backups and redundant systems, the damage any single admin could do would be minimal. Maybe costly in terms of downtime, but nothing that's going to grind your business to a halt. Just as in government, there needs to be checks and balances. Giving a single admin too much power is a very bad idea. There's the way things should be done and the way things are done. For a company of this size, the story should be a non-issue, even if the sabotage was successful. "Pull the binder for disaster scenario 454 off the shelf, start at step 1." Maybe lose a day or two getting the restores in place, no problem. But what's the reality? Probably something more like "Gee, I think we might have the backup from two months ago. Yeah, we needed more tapes, more SAN's, whatever, but the board wouldn't approve our budget."

There's also the case of smaller companies who cannot afford to pay two sysadmins, you get these single points of failure that you cannot afford to fix. Of course, perspectives change when the failure happens and the fix is ten times what prevention would have cost but hindsight is always 20/20.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[isa-kuruption]

Well, it goes deeper than just doing restores. Medco Health is a provider of prescription benefits management and a mail order pharmacy (see their website). It's likely that the result of a 2 or even 3 day outage of these systems would have affected their ability to deliver drugs to customers and the ability of brick-n-mortar pharmacies to process prescriptions. So, yes, while a recovery plan was most likely in place, you can't explain to the family of someone who died that they couldn't get their prescription due to the inability to process their prescription card.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[jhol13]

How you can ensure that the data on the backups is not tampered?

If I were on IT and wanted to make maximum damage I would slowly and little by little corrupt financial databases, over a very long time (the longer the better).

Then just wait for a year and then the next 10-K, make a hint of SOx error and ...

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[vegiVamp]

> we're talking about your PROFESSIONAL REPUTATION here. This guy's never gonna work in IT again.

Yeah, but only because he was sloppy :-)

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would workers in a small businesses get disgruntled as much? I would think the variety of work and being "not just another faceless employee" would mean they'd be able to vent their anger in a different way - "the boss" isn't in company HQ 3000 miles away, and all your problems have faces on them instead of policy names.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[dawich]

Worked for a small company - single server that handled payroll/inventory/sales/everything. An ex-employee, disgruntled for being fired, stole said server, and the safe containing the backup tapes, except for the offsite backups. However, he stole the install media, and there was no such thing as bare metal restore at the time.

It took 6 weeks to recover from that. In that time, the company lost half of its staff and customers. Went from being a sales-award winning computer shop and the fastest Mac and PC repair in the area to an also ran that couldn't get credit - no credit, no product, no customers.

R

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[angus_rg]

It's not as easy as one thinks. Anyone can gain access with the right tools. If you wanted the user's password in the cube next to you, simply put a hardware key logger on their computer. The chance someone checks for this every time the log into their device is slim to none.

The thing that makes this type of issue difficult is that they already have an in with the organization, and with the right amount of patience, the time to get what they need. The only secure system is one that does not exist. 99% of it is user intelligence. We all know disgruntled employees who felt they were passed up for a deserved promotion. They key is to make sure everyone pays attention to signs so potential threats can be scrutinized, and to pray that any behavioral anomalies are noticed, if they even exist.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[DMorritt]

Thankfully, most sysadmins are honest ethical people.

Never read BOFH?

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[jollyreaper]

How you can ensure that the data on the backups is not tampered?

If I were on IT and wanted to make maximum damage I would slowly and little by little corrupt financial databases, over a very long time (the longer the better).

Then just wait for a year and then the next 10-K, make a hint of SOx error and ... That's a concern I raised at my last job when HR would keep forgetting to tell us when people were fired. "You do realize they have access to our system remotely and will continue to do so until you tell us to disable it?" Yes, but they did not think it was important. And I told them how straight deletes would be easy to deal with since we have backups but any kind of subtle sabotage like dicking with numbers on spreadsheets might be missed for months. They still didn't get it. But after having worked there a while, I realized it was very hard to tell the difference between intentional sabotage over a period of time and incompetent people doing their jobs poorly.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Venik]

You are not a sysadmin, are you? A sysadmin is the guy with complete, absolute, total, unrestricted control of a number of your critical servers and a good chunk of your data. Not everything, but a sizable piece of your infrastructure. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure support may be divided among multiple groups of sysadmins. Still, many sysadmins have sufficient access to take your business down for a long time, if not permanently.

Backups? If this Yung-Hsun Lin character was any good, you would have no usable backups to recover from. And he would have never been caught either. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure can be enormous with hundreds, even thousands of people supporting it. In an environment like this, bordering areas of responsibility seep into each other. Often the same people may be supporting your data storage, Unix servers and backups, for example. And then management gets greedy and tries to get the same people handle more work, so the same sysadmin eventually end up with almost total control of everything. Outsourcing is another reason for too much control being concentrated in too few hands.

Why plant a logic bomb? In my experience, there are many sysadmins with no concern for their professional reputation, because they don't have any to begin with. They are not professionals and many have no experience and clue what they are doing. But then there are also clueless IT managers, who fail to understand the extent to which sysadmins control the business and treat them like garbage. This attitude sometimes hits a nerve even with professional sysadmins.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[asuffield]

This guy's never gonna work in IT again.

Oh boy. You haven't seen IT hiring practices, have you? No person shall be barred from employment for reason of age, gender, race, appearance, incompetence, or general desire to burn the company to the ground. Nor shall we check any of these things when hiring. Instead, we shall hire based on their ability to preach about the importance of "teamwork" and "communication" skills, and their ability to lie like a salesdroid.

I wish I was making this stuff up.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, most sysadmins are honest ethical people.

Never read BOFH?

I feel really bad about having to break this to you, but Simon actually makes those stories up. I know, I know. It's a sick, sad world we live in where someone needs to invent stories about a homicidal system administrator who has never faced any repercussions related to the rather large body count currently mouldering in his tape safes, but such is the world we live in.

Just wish someone had told me that before I started to emulate him, but there's no use crying over spilled milk, I suppose.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

I'm not advocating this and agree with your consensus that it is unprofessional - but you could plant a logic bomb that appears to be a new problem (that only you can solve).

I'm sure this happens quite a lot.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[COMON$]

This is exactly why you try your hardest to keep your CIO happy, same with CFO or any other office that has the capability to singlehandedly destroy your business with little thought. As a sysadmin myself I can say that the majority of systems I have worked on could be taken down for weeks if a bad sysadmin were to get a hold of the system, or an CFO who slowly corrupts data. Sure there are offsite backups but guess who creates those? And there is paper but many businesses are doing away that medium, even if they were available it is nothing a good fire would fix on your way out the door. It comes down to hiring good ethical employees and keeping them happy, that is all that is going to save you.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my mind, this means that you should always have more than one admin, never giving anybody absolute authority over ALL systems. With offsite backups and redundant systems, the damage any single admin could do would be minimal.

Aside from the fact that your assertion is idiotic, I don't even have to be a sysadmin to screw things up royally.

Ever see that bigass red emergency power button that's for use in case of fire or electrocution only? You know, the one that shitcans the UPS along with line power? If you don't know what I'm talking about then you don't work in a real datacenter. Anyway, let's just say that you work in a Fortune 500 company, and that somebody hits that button (mistakenly or otherwise) in an environment running everything from clustered UNIX and Linux down to Win2k3 (maybe 200-400 servers). Without getting into specifics, you'll be down for awhile.. long enough to hurt.. badly. And yes, it has happened.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[jandrese]

The problem with that plan is when someone checks their bank account, notices a problem, and the investigation comes right back to your systems before you have a chance to extract maximum damage. Unless of course you get put in charge of investigating the irregularity.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy's never gonna work in IT again.

Why would anyone like to work in IT?

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think a computer shop would know better.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[morgan_greywolf]

You are not a sysadmin, are you? A sysadmin is the guy with complete, absolute, total, unrestricted control of a number of your critical servers and a good chunk of your data. Not everything, but a sizable piece of your infrastructure. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure support may be divided among multiple groups of sysadmins. Still, many sysadmins have sufficient access to take your business down for a long time, if not permanently. Yes, I am. And, unfortunately, you're right -- most of the time. In quite a few places I've worked, though, they usually don't give every admin all the admin passwords. The ideal scenario is this in an enterprise environment:

1) This scenario assumes all critical severs are running some form of *nix.
2) Multiple admins are assigned to various parts of infrastructure: data manaagement, backup administration, storage administration, mail, web, etc. None are given root passwords to ANYTHING. IT management retains the root passwords. All admins are given sudo or sudo-like access to do what they need and NOTHING more. Networking equipment is outsourced. Admins do not have access to the networking equipment. All sudo-like accesses are logged - redundantly.
3) Pure separation of duties. The data guy doesn't get to fiddle with the backups or storage, etc.,
4) OS installs, etc., are handled by a separate platform group. The platform group consists of trusted individuals who only create images for installation. Selected, trusted sysadmins install from images, but only have access to the automated tools and not to media, etc.
5) Proper physical security, searches, etc.

I could go on, but you get the gist.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[Venik]

The scheme you are proposing will never work. Sudo for sysadmins instead of root? You must be confusing them with operators. Who is setting up and maintaining sudo? Root password for IT managers? They don't need it, they wouldn't know what to do with it. You cannot configure or recover a system without root access. Sudo is OK for the ops to keep things running, but sysadmins need root access to do their daily work.

You cannot completely separate data storage, backups, and servers. Servers access data from SAN or NAS, for example, giving the sysadmin access to the data either directly or via a user account. To do backups, you need to load, say, NetBackup client onto the server. Sysadmin controls the the client configuration. I can create an exclude or redirect list and your NetBackup admin will be running dummy backups without ever suspecting a thing.

Outsourcing networking will compromise security - not improve it. In real world, even when storage and server support is outsourced, in most cases networking is kept in-house. In any case, sysadmins have on-site physical access to servers. Even without knowing a root password, say, on a Solaris box, I can boot it from CD, mount /etc and overwrite the shadow file. The whole thing will only take 10-20 minutes. This is just the simplest of examples.

I work in an environment with thousands of servers and, naturally, we have sudo, multiple root passwords, several departments supporting various elements of the infrastructure. I never had to get access to the Exchange servers and I don't know the password, but I can break in if I really want to. Or, as a NetBackup admin, I can restore a shadow file to an alternate server and crack any password I need.

As a sysadmin, I can set up a backdoor on a server that will work even if I am canned and my access to the company network is terminated. You just pick a server with access to the Web, create a cron job that runs a script, create a script that wgets a command from a Web site and executes it on the server. You can create daemons, dummy accounts, 'at' jobs, and do a myriad other things that are exceedingly easy for a sysadmin to do.

You need someone to constantly watch for these type of surprises. And how do you do this with thousands of servers and hundreds of people? As a manager, you keep an eye on your backups, treat people right, cross your fingers and hope nobody gets pissed off enough to do something like this. In any groups of sysadmins you will always have a few guys who are really very good at what they do. It would be a terrible thing for a manager to do to upset these guys, for no amount of security and data recovery consultants will ever put your IT humpty dumpty back together.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[mabhatter654]

the point of IT policies and practices is to PREVENT damage as much as possible... keep the doors locked and the fences mended, prevent damage from "idle hands" as much as possible. After all, the law can only PUNISH after the fact! The police won't stop the 3 weeks of recovery of your business from such an attack and your job may be gone before the criminal ever gets to jail!

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[More_Cowbell]

It comes down to hiring good ethical employees and keeping them happy, that is all that is going to save you.

Exactly, but I would add that hiring good ethical employees, sadly, doesn't mean you really have to keep them happy. By their nature, the worst they will do if unhappy is leave. It may seem like an odd point, but I am in this boat myself. To illustrate:

Sure there are offsite backups but guess who creates those?

I create those. And a little hint, I'm nowhere near being CIO.
Working for a web-hosting co, I have root access to literally thousands of servers. Yeah, those clients that pay us for triple redundant, globally load balanced servers with multiple instances of off site backups? rm -rf / ring a bell?
Not only could I delete entire servers at a whim, remotely, I create all their backups and it would take me seconds to delete any record of them. I'm quite sure there are many others in this position as well.

Luckily for all involved, if I was ever that unhappy, I would just find a new job.

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins?

[COMON$]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I do think it is odd that in our profession so much power is given to individuals who are not chief officers and management wonders why we demand higher salaries. Alas this is the life of the engineer and why Dilbert is so horrifically funny to us.

Unfortunately, these disgruntled people often seem to be the ones who have a set of skills tied to the system they are in currently. They weren't bright enough to keep a good skill base under them so finding a new job for them isn't an option. One of the reasons I chose Network Engineering/System Administration was that it was easy to find work and I wasn't tied to one language or type of system.

I don't get this...

[Corporate Troll]

Why so destructive? I would be way more effective to place a "corrupter" on the network. Instead of destroying the data, let it gradually corrupt the data. Way more damage, and probably much harder to recover from with backups.

Re:I don't get this...

[FuzzyDaddy]

You're missing the psychology of the situation. He wanted everyone in the company in a complete panic at once, so they would be really sorry they laid off poor old Andy Lin. It wasn't the damage, it was the psychological effect he was looking for.

Re:I don't get this...

[Corporate Troll]

Guess I tend to think that data is more important that people ;-) You don't do these kinds of stunts in order to make them re-hire you.

Re:I don't get this...

[morgan_greywolf]

Or replace or, in open source systems, edit the NIC driver(s). Have it change random bits in the packets. They'll probably spend WEEKS trying to track THAT down. :-D

Re:I don't get this...

[mcrbids]

You're missing the psychology of the situation. He wanted everyone in the company in a complete panic at once, so they would be really sorry they laid off poor old Andy Lin. It wasn't the damage, it was the psychological effect he was looking for.

Except that you are wrong. He didn't want them to be sorry they laid him off. He just wanted them in a complete panic. If you had read TFA, you'd know that:

1) He wrote the script,

2) It failed to "go off" on his birthday,

3) He modified the script to "go off" on his following birthday, and

4) The script was discovered by somebody else before it went off on his following birthday.

This guy is a malicious weenie, and deserves time in PMITA prison. I mean, what kind of stupid, setting it to go off on your birthday?

Re:I don't get this...

[tnk1]

Why so destructive? I would be way more effective to place a "corrupter" on the network. Instead of destroying the data, let it gradually corrupt the data. Way more damage, and probably much harder to recover from with backups.

A number of reasons. A top reason is that a slow burn corruption doesn't make any impact. This guy is trying to make a statement, and you don't make a statement if no one finds out that someone fucked them over. He wants to show them that they "messed with the wrong guy". A slow burn sort of corruption is something a calculating, mercenary industrial saboteur would do. That pro's motivation is probably a payoff and he wants to stay in business, while this guy is just acting out his feelings of being unappreciated and underestimated.

Secondly, if you do it the slow way, it takes time and he could have only had a short window before he expected his access to be revoked or a fix to be applied without actually doing much damage.

Mostly though, for a slow insidious sort of attack, you have to be a cold, calculating sort of customer, and those sorts tend to realize that you will end up paying fines and in a federal "pound me in the ass" prison if they get caught. It generally takes someone who is a hothead who simmers for awhile and then explodes to actually execute these sorts of acts.

Re:I don't get this...

[FuzzyDaddy]

If you had read TFA, you'd know that

Who does that?

Re:I don't get this...

[setagllib]

Great idea, because it's not like we have checksum verification in the driver-neutral layer to handle that. Oh wait.

Of course, then you can just break the driver-neutral layer and even regular network quality faults will no longer be compensated.

Re:I don't get this...

[morgan_greywolf]

Whoosh.

In the driver-neutral layer, what happens if the checksum verification fails?
Answer: It resends in the packet.

What happens if every packet is corrupted in someway?
Answer: No actually useful communication (and a lot of very un-useful communication) occurs on the network. All noise, no signal.

What would a network admin or sys admin do to fix that?
Answer: Test the cable, try a new NIC, replace the cable anyway, replace the switch, etc., ad infinitum. It won't occur to 90% of *nix sysadmins that the problem is at the NIC driver. Windows admins might be a little more quick to change the driver ("but it was working before!")

Of course, changing the driver-neutral layer, as described would be even better because you could introduce random errors at THAT level, too.

Re:I don't get this...

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

He wants to show them that they "messed with the wrong guy".

Why am I reminded of those "when keeping it real goes wrong" sketches on Chappelles' show?

Based on the execution, it looks like the guy either wanted to get caught, or was so incompetent that he didn't realize that all signs would point to him. There were bugs in his time bombs that prevented them from running and allowed the other admins to find the scripts. He set the bomb to go off on his birthday?! He also went with the rather spectacular catastrophic failure instead of the harder to detect and even harder to repair attack of small data corruptions introduced over long periods of time.

Pulling this kind of crap on a former employer is just idiotic. The FBI _will_ get involved and they _will_ trace it back to you.

Re:I don't get this...

[Corporate Troll]

A slow burn sort of corruption is something a calculating, mercenary industrial saboteur would do. That pro's motivation is probably a payoff and he wants to stay in business

for a slow insidious sort of attack, you have to be a cold, calculating sort of customer

I don't really know if I need to take those statements as ompliments or as an insults ;-)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

2.5 years, apparently.

seems fair, but...

[nguy]

In principle, this seems fair, but I worry that courts simply aren't up to distinguishing deliberate acts of sabotage from perfectly legitimate behavior. That is, I don't like courts having the power to impose stiff sentences for "computer crime" because I think courts and juries simply aren't up to determining reliably when a computer crime has been committed, and until they are, they shouldn't have that power.

Re:seems fair, but...

[demonlapin]

I'm an anesthesiologist. It's virtually impossible for judges and the lay public to determine, really, whether I committed malpractice (absent blatantly criminal acts). In fact, most doctors would probably need a fair amount of exposition to determine whether or not I committed malpractice (as I would, in turn, if faced with a case from another specialty). And yet we are judged by twelve people who could not escape jury duty. Yes, I'd prefer if I were judged only by my colleagues, and so would you. But if that were the case, nobody would ever trust us. It's the price you pay for having a society.

Re:seems fair, but...

[JaredOfEuropa]

[...] I think courts and juries simply aren't up to determining reliably when a computer crime has been committed, and until they are, they shouldn't have that power.

How is this any different from complex fiscal issues, medical malpractise cases, or claims arising from alleged building construction errors? Courts and jurors are no experts in any of these fields, that's why they (or rather, the plaintiff and defense) bring in expert witnesses.

I suppose that you could fairly assert that the law itself in many countries is not (yet) adequately equiped to distinguish between deliberate sabotage and legitimate or msotly harmless acts. For instance, The first Dutch law on computer crime and cracking made it a felony to change someone else's electric alarm clock. But these laws have been greatly improved since, and I daresay that they can adequately distinguish between lawful acts and sabotage in case a disgruntled sysop decides to wipe the servers and backups.

Re:seems fair, but...

[xSauronx]

Well now *I* don't trust you!

Re:seems fair, but...

[MMC Monster]

IANAAIAAC (I am not an anesthesiologist, I am a cardiologist), and I agree.

There are things that you really need a great deal of training to understand, that expert witnesses cannot really stress to a jury. When I get sued for malpractice, I would much rather have a jury of my peers and a physician-judge than 12 guys that were picked up off the street, with jury selection involving a prosecuting attorney that wants to get all the educated individuals eliminated from the jury pool.

Re:seems fair, but...

[Slashdot Parent]

There are things that you really need a great deal of training to understand, that expert witnesses cannot really stress to a jury. Then you need a better expert witness who has better communication skills. How hard can it be?

Prosecutor's Expert Witness: "MMC Monster did X, when he should have done Y."
Defense's Expert Witness: "Well, doing X was reasonable at the time because of Z. Hindsight being 20/20, we see X caused harm, but doing X conforms with industry best practices, and 90% of cardiologists would have done the same thing."

In reality, the point is moot. No malpractice claim against you is ever going to go to trial, unless you have a slam-dunk, airtight defense. Your malpractice insurer will say, "Settle and we'll pay. Take this to trial, and you're on your own, big guy."

Re:seems fair, but...

[Culture]

I am a state licensed professional (in a different field), have testified as an expert witness over 60 times (about 30/70 plaintiff/defense in civil cases), and have been sued myself for Errors & Omissions several times. While I sympathize with your point, you and I know that if we were judged by our peers, we would get WWWAAYYY too much benefit of the doubt. My experience is the the jury is generally pretty reasonable, and my field of structural engineering is no more understandable to the layperson than yours.

Re:seems fair, but...

[rk]

My guess is you're a very good cardiologist, because otherwise you'd know that malpractice is a civil matter and that a prosecuting attorney is not involved in your case at all (at least in the United States).

Or, you're a really bad one, and your malpractice rose to the level of criminal negligence, which is when a prosecutor would get involved. :-P

As an anecdotal counterpoint to your jury selection process: I was on a jury for a medical malpractice case against the surgeon (an appendectomy that went wrong), and the jury selection process definitely went in the opposite direction. All nine of us (8 jurors, one alternate, which was the standard for Ohio civil suits in 1997) were educated professionals, including a JD, and someone who had some advanced medical training (though admittedly not a doctor). I was actually one of the LEAST schooled members of that jury, with my little bachelor of science degree, and a semester of graduate CS classes. I'm not one to get out of jury duty unless I have a REALLY good reason to, and my employer paid for jury-duty, and even if they didn't, I had more PTO banked up than I could possibly use, anyway.

We also found that the surgeon was not responsible for the problems. If anyone was responsible, it was a radiologist who did a follow-on procedure to drain an infection, and I doubt he did anything wrong either (but that wasn't our job to determine). I felt really bad for the plaintiff, but I think all that happened is that no surgical procedure is risk-free and she rolled snake-eyes. She spent the better part of a year in convalescent care.

We spent a week in court, and it was basically 5 days of nothing but expert testimony, and it was little different than going to class. We had so much knowledge crammed into us during that period that at the end of it I felt that in a worst-case survival scenario, I could've done an appendectomy myself if there were no qualified doctors available.

Re:seems fair, but...

[tillerman35]

I agree- and I'm in IT, not medicine. I had a situation where I was working on a bug the very day I (and lots of other nice people) were laid off. When the bug finally manifested with three days of downtime and over 100K of lost revenue, I was asked to come back and fix it (for free, after having been laid off four days before Christmas). I should add that they did ask politely. When I refused, they told me they were going to have me arrested for "planting" the bug. To a jury of programmers, the bugzilla logs, emails, and SQL saved on my work PC would have made it overwhelmingly obvious that I did nothing wrong (aside from making a false assumption about an input parameter's validity). To a jury of 12 laypersons, the only relevant fact would have been that the CVS logs showed me as the one who first checked in a flawed copy. Being a stubborn idiot, I still refused (just slightly less politely than before). I still told them to fark off, but in retrospect I probably should have caved. The cost to defend myself would have bankrupted me and put my family on the street.

Re:seems fair, but...

[bcrowell]

And yet we are judged by twelve people who could not escape jury duty.
Please think before propagating this meme, which is scornful and dismissive toward people who are trying to do their civic duty. People have been fighting and dying since 1215 AD to get the right to trial by jury. We're lucky to have it. When you say this, here's how it comes off: (1) you think you're way smarter than your peers; (2) you want to weasel out of jury duty; and (3) you want to complain that if you're involved in a jury trial, the people who (unlike you) actually do their duty are too dumb, so you're afraid you won't be happy with their verdict.

Re:seems fair, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU!

I'm tired of it as well.

It seems like a lot of ./'ers talk the talk about their Rights, but many just don't do their part of it.

Re:seems fair, but...

[stry_cat]

This is why we're supposed to be tired by our peers. Unfortunately, the judicial system has so distorted the meaning of the word that we're in the situation you describe.

Re:seems fair, but...

[nguy]

That may be so, but courts have many decades of experience with medical malpractice; they lack such experience for computer-related cases. Furthermore, medical issues are far less abstract than computer and security-related issues, and are a lot more accessible to juries.

Re:seems fair, but...

[nguy]

How is this any different from complex fiscal issues, medical malpractise cases, or claims arising from alleged building construction errors? Courts and jurors are no experts in any of these fields, that's why they (or rather, the plaintiff and defense) bring in expert witnesses.

It's different in two ways.

First, courts have a lot of experience with finance, medicine, and construction. There are standards, certifications, experts, and precedents. Computer security is new, and there is no track record or standards.

Second, finance, medicine, and construction require skill and experience, but they are, in the end, fairly concrete subjects that people can relate to. Computer science and computer security is often more like advanced mathematics or high-energy physics.

Re:seems fair, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder my grandma can't get her surgery scheduled until next month. You're all surfing slashdot!

Re:seems fair, but...

[demonlapin]

Well...

1) I am both smarter and better educated than most of my peers - as are most of the people on /. I have a post-graduate education in an area where only about 20% of my "peers" have a college degree. (I'm aware that not everyone without a college degree is unintelligent. It is, however, a fairly good proxy, in that plumbers and carpenters with good heads on their shoulders are counterbalanced by [insert your favorite joke major here].) I may or may not be smarter than you, but I'm pretty sure that both of us are several standard deviations above the norm for my area.

2) Call it weaseling if you like, but for a lot of people jury duty represents a significant hardship. I'm still in residency, which means that if I miss more than ten days of a month, I have to repeat the month - at the end of residency. That means that I can't go on to pursue a fellowship for another year, if at all. Sure, the hospital that employs me will give me the time off, but that ten days of jury duty (unlikely for a basic criminal jury, but entirely likely for a major case or a civil trial) will cost me the difference between a resident's income (under $15/hr) and a full independent physician's income (>>$15/hr) for a full month, as well as causing severe hardship for my fellow residents (who would have to cover all of my call duties). I would be insane not to try to get out of it (and, in my state, being a physician pretty much excuses you without having to appear - just write a letter to the court clerk). Would you like it if your doctor's appointment was postponed for another three to six months because she drew jury duty? What if the carpenter rebuilding your kitchen had to call it quits halfway through, for an unspecified period of time, just because he worked for himself? Many, many small businesses consist of one or two principals and would be absolutely killed by jury duty.

Mind you, my municipality recently had a series of incidents involving jurors' cars - having transported themselves at their own expense to the courthouse, they were required to pay for parking; having parked on the city streets, they were ticketed for expired meters; having found streets without meters, their cars were broken into. All this for $5 a day (which won't even pay for your parking)?

As for 3), well, it's not that people who do jury duty are dumb. It's that they have nothing better to do. That might mean a group of retired professionals (including, when I'm retired, me) - but where I live, it's infinitely more likely to be a bunch of people in their twenties and thirties who don't have jobs. You can imagine how, in a civil court, those people will take one look at my (future) income statements and ignore the past that went into it.

It's unfortunate that during the one time in my life - the summer between college and medical school - that I was really able to do jury duty, I didn't get picked. I'd enjoy doing it when retired, I think. You're right that jury duty should not be disparaged, but the modern justice system creates an incredible burden on those called to duty without any hint of compensation.

Here's my logic bomb!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

1. Imagine an internet news site defined as the greatest conceivable news site: no dupes, no bad summaries, no typos, no goatse or gnaa or other tired cliches.
2. It is greater to exist in reality than merely in imagination.
3. If this perfect news site did not exist, then you could have an idea of an even greater new site - one which did exist.
4. In that case the perfect site in your imagination would not be perfect: a logical contradiction.
5. So this perfect news site must exist in reality.
6. ???
7. Profit!

Re:Here's my logic bomb!

[somersault]

It probably does exist, but then you get people like you coming along and posting off-topic that ruin it ;)

Re:Here's my logic bomb!

[defile39]

Does it increase or decrease my geek status that I get your Cartesian proof of the existence of God reference?

Re:Here's my logic bomb!

[Tony Hoyle]

Step 3 is incorrect. You already established it's impossible for you to have merely the idea of the perfect internet news site, as only an existing one could be perfect. Therefore the following steps are wrong also.

Re:Here's my logic bomb!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

So you are saying you do not have in your understanding what I mean by "the greatest possible news site"?

Re:Here's my logic bomb!

[RandomPrecision]

Decrease, apparently, because that's Anselm's ontological argument.

a logic bomb?

[theheadlessrabbit]

so would everyone in the blast radius of this 'logic bomb' be hit with a blast of reason and common sense?
would those affected begin acting rationally?
maybe the courts would wake up and start letting the common people win for a change.
i think we need more of these logic bombs.

live long and prosper, logic bomber...

Re:a logic bomb?

[Loibisch]

No, they would start thinking in terms of 'AND', 'OR' and 'NOT'...what you are thinking about is a reason bomb, or even better a 'smart bomb' :)

Re:a logic bomb?

[theheadlessrabbit]

but if politicians think XOR, or NAND....what then?

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

live long and prosper, logic bomber...

If it was financial data I might agree with you, but this guy destroyed medical records. How would you feel if all your medical records were destroyed? Especially if you were right in the middle of chemo, or radio, or treatment for AIDS?

This guy's sentence was not only just, I think it should have been longer. I have a freind in Dwight Correctional Center (a maximum security women's prison in Illinois) for selling a couple of joints to an undercover cop. Are you telling me that destroying medical records is less harmful that marijuana?

Re:a logic bomb?

[theheadlessrabbit]

I actually agree with you fully on that one.
my mother went through chemo a few years ago, and if some little shit had erased her records part way through and caused her any harm, I would have been very upset/angry.

I was referring to a user of my fictional 'logic bomb' that would blast people with logic.

inject people with the logic to realize that whatever personal vendetta you might have with your company, it is not worth jeopardizing thousands of lives to 'get eve'.
enough logic to allow law makers and law enforcement to see that weed should be decriminalized. Give people a ticket, make possession of weed the equivalent of speeding. (it was like that for a few months in my country, but then we caved due to pressures from your country)

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoooooooooooooooooooooooooosh*!

Re:a logic bomb?

[Logic Bomb]

Thank you for your kind words.

I'm going to plead the 5th on this particular incident, though....

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

simple, connect the output of one NAND politician to both inputs of a second NAND politician and you have the equivalent of one AND politician, the downside you might think is you need more politicians, but a NAND politician is decidedly simpler then an AND politician. Basically an AND politician is a NAND politician with a NOT clerk attached to its output.

cant be bothered right now with figuring out how to make an OR with XOR gates, but its probably quite similar.

Re:a logic bomb?

[RowingMunkeyCU]

If it was financial data I might agree with you, but this guy destroyed medical records. How would you feel if all your medical records were destroyed? Especially if you were right in the middle of chemo, or radio, or treatment for AIDS? The thing is, it's not the actual medical records that would have been destroyed, it's the medical INSURANCE records that would have been destroyed. The destruction of insurance records, while causing possible monetary issues for the hospital, insurance company (Medco), and/or patient wouldn't likely cause an interruption of critical services. By the way, I work in IT for an HMO that used to work with Medco.

It also appears that there may be some sort of drug interaction database that also would have been lost, but any doctor with half a brain in his/her skull would be able to deal just fine without a database to tell them what drugs interact with others.

Re:a logic bomb?

[dekemoose]

That sound you just heard was the joke going over your head.

Re:a logic bomb?

[__aailob1448]

OH MY GOD! WHAT'S THAT HEADING OUR WAY? Is it a bird? Is it superman? Oh, thank goodness, it went right over our heads.

It was...a JOKE! DUM DUM DUM!

Re:a logic bomb?

[plover]

Well, I RTFA, so I'd like to pick a nit or three. First, note that this guy did NOT destroy medical records. He destroyed absolutely "nothing". He was a complete and utter failure at being a logic bomber (does that make him an illogic bomber, perhaps?)

Next, he was attempting to delete records at Medco, who is essentially an insurance firm and not an actual "health care provider". This means the records would have contained data like "how much did we pay out for prescription X?" and not scheduling "your next chemotherapy treatment is for drug Y on date Z." Sure if Medco started double-charging me for prescriptions or not picking up the tab after my co-pay, I'd be mad, but I probably wouldn't be dead.

Finally, TFA even states the worst case scenario would have been the loss of drug interaction data being delivered to the pharmacist in a timely fashion. But pharmacists are already trained in drug interactions, and don't actually need the computer to remind them. In this particular case, it sounds like the consumer's drug information pamphlet wouldn't have been printed. Yes, I consider that a very serious problem, but it's only one step in the chain of protection. So the real worst case was that if it didn't print, my pharmacist would have had the responsibility to explain to me that "foovoline can't be taken with blahmacillin, and should be taken two hours after eating."

I'm not saying the guy wasn't total slime and doesn't deserve his sentence (he was trying to cripple his company, after all.) But you are attempting to have him personally hung for crimes he did not commmit. That's a typical prosecution tactic to sway a jury, but it's not based on facts.

Re:a logic bomb?

[Gigaflynn]

less harmful than marijuana?

wtf are you on about, of course it is.

you bloody americans think that anyone who's even so much as has a freinds who's mum's dog once had a

spliff when they were 16 is scum

fuck sake, 5 years automatic sentence of a single spliff? don't you have bigger things to deal with!

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

I see, kind of like Triallian's "empathy gun".

You should set some of your logic bombs off in close proximity to some middle east suicide bombs! And shoot them with Trillian's gun.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

PLEAD the fifth? Not me, I'm drinking the damned thing!

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

Well, not having RTFA that is new to me. The summary said "medical records", insurance records is a whole 'nother ball game.

Re:a logic bomb?

[jjohnson]

That he failed is immaterial in sentencing terms. You get the same sentence for trying to shoot me and missing as you do for actually shooting me. Incompetence is not a mitigating factor, legally.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

I don't know how long Linda's going to be in jail, but I agree with you wholeheartedly; she shluldn't be in jail at all. As you can see form my journals, I like to smoke pot and hire prostitutes. Many of my friends are hookers. Linda is; she's going up on a prostitution charge when she gets out of prison on the reefer charge. Where are the "pro-choice" people when it comes to drugs and prostitution? Where's MY choice? How is my smoking a joint anybody's business but my own, especially how is it government's business?

Pro choice: It's ok to remove a fetus, but not to insert a drug

pro Life: It's not ok to abort a blastocyst but it's OK to execute a grown human.

Doublespeck: see Orwell's "1984" for both "pro-life" and "pro-choice".

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

you bloody americans think that anyone who's even so much as has a freinds who's mum's dog once had a spliff when they were 16 is scum

You actually believe that most Americans think that marijuana is evil?

Damn. And I thought that the USA's population was poorly educated. Compared to your lot, we are "bloody" geniuses.

Re:a logic bomb?

[meringuoid]

less harmful than marijuana? wtf are you on about, of course it is. you bloody americans think that anyone who's even so much as has a freinds who's mum's dog once had a spliff when they were 16 is scum

Reread the sentence, and reread what you just wrote.

Item A: deleting the medical records of a large number of people.
Item B: smoking marijuana

To claim that item A is less harmful than item B is to place an inordinately high risk assessment on the smoking of marijuana. I'm sure you'll agree that marijuana's not particularly dangerous, while messing with medical records poses a clear threat to people undergoing life-critical treatment. So, fucking with medical records is more dangerous than marijuana, and so should be punished more heavily.

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Marijuana could be sold to someone who would get high and drive a vehicle, thusly endangering many people.

Marijuana could be sold to someone who forgets they left the oven on because they are high and ends up burning down an entire apartment building.

Marijuana could be sold to someone who would share it with a child, creating an attraction to the use of other drugs, alcohol or tobacco.

I don't give a fuck what you say about it, marijuana is illegal for a damned good reason and anyone caught with it SHOULD get jail time.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sexybomber]

Are you telling me that destroying medical records is less harmful that marijuana?

The GP isn't. But the US government is.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

Are you telling me that destroying medical records is less harmful that marijuana?
The GP isn't. But the US government is.
The same US government that has us at war with Iraq? The same US government that wrote the DMCA?

Oh right, THAT US government! No, I'm not a big fan of them.

Why is it that tobacco is highly addictive and kills almost every one of its users yet is legal, while marijuana is no more habit forming than orange juice, has never killed anyone (no known overdose amount and no known adverse health effects) yet can get you put in prison?

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's when they start thinking in OR rather than the more usual XOR that you have to worry. The English word or has the same meaning as the Boolean exclusive or.

Nope.

Re:a logic bomb?

[GTMoogle]

I find the implication that marijuana is bad because it's a gateway to alcohol and tobacco HILARIOUS.

Re:a logic bomb?

[celle]

2.5 years for the attempt, no real crime committed, is pretty stiff. If it had gone off and someone had died then put him under the jail but for just creating the the thing and placing it???!! It's just government doing the job of company policy of firing and blackballing such individuals. This saves the company money by not having to take responsibility for their own people and company behaviors such as not using alternative data backup methods or security. Remember its just electrons in the ether until it actually physically hurts/kills someone and by someone I don't mean companies.

Re:a logic bomb?

[celle]

You don't see any CEOs, boards, or execs go to jail when they make multiple decisions that belly up the company do you? Bankers anyone? These guys definitely hurt more people and knew they would than this guy potentially could have and they got away with it. I've seen nothing here about intent, without it you've got nothing. He obviously wasn't making the right political payoffs.

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that your friend is in jail for something that shouldn't even be an offense doesn't mean everyone else should get harsher sentences just to preserve your sense of relative justice - the only thing it means is that your friend shouldn't be in jail.

Also, you're creating strawmen and addressing fear. Legal cases are not about what MIGHT have happened in a worst-case scenario; they are about what did happen.

Put another way... I could just as well argue that your friend got a just sentence because whoever bought the Mary Jane from her might have suffered from a novel medical condition that would cause them to go on a spontaneous killing spree in the nearest school as soon as they smoked it, so WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! and lock her up for good.

Right? No, of course not; that way of thinking is idiotic, and I hope you'll see why.

Re:a logic bomb?

[greyhueofdoubt]

Off topic, but some of us would argue that you are setting up a strawman argument w.r.t. the friend who sold the joints. Some of us would say that she did not commit a crime, and thus comparing her 'offense' to this guy's actual crime would be as senseless as comparing country music to baroque paintings.

When people make these arguments, they need to understand that: No, selling pot is NOT worse than destroying records. She might be in jail longer than someone convicted of manslaughter. That doesn't make pot worse than manslaughter, it means that we have a broken legal system. And that is a discussion that should happen, but it won't anytime soon.

-b

Re:a logic bomb?

[LandruBek]

- - - joke - - > (moving)

    (space here)

  your  head   (stationary)

Re:a logic bomb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you really missed the point of that joke.

They were not actually cheering the act, they were commenting on the phrase "logic bomb" and went on to spin a fantasy scenario involving an actual bomb that created logical behavior instead of destroying anything.

Hard to believe this comment got +5 insightful.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sexybomber]

Why is it that tobacco is highly addictive and kills almost every one of its users yet is legal, while marijuana is no more habit forming than orange juice, has never killed anyone (no known overdose amount and no known adverse health effects) yet can get you put in prison?

Because MJ makes you feel content and okay with your life; thus you aren't compelled to recklessly consume and buy stuff to achieve the same effect.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

You don't see any CEOs, boards, or execs go to jail when they make multiple decisions that belly up the company do you?

No, but you should see it! I still can't figure out why no Sony execs went to the slammer for the rootkit.

Except, of course, for the facts that the world's governments and laws are for sale, and that no rich and powerful man ever goes to prison unless a richer and more powerful man wants him there.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

I find the implication that marijuana should be against the law because it shares some traits with alcohol hilarious as well!

Re:a logic bomb?

[sm62704]

That doesn't make pot worse than manslaughter, it means that we have a broken legal system

That was entirely the point of the post. Linda didn't harm anyone, if the summary was correct (and from comments appears not to have been) this guy's actions could have done harm.

As it's been pointed out that it wasn't mediacl records that were destroyed, but rather insurance records, I think the guy should get a medal. I hate insurance companies; they only exist to capitalize on misfortune and the fear of it.

Re:a logic bomb?

[sjames]

Finally, TFA even states the worst case scenario would have been the loss of drug interaction data being delivered to the pharmacist in a timely fashion. But pharmacists are already trained in drug interactions,...

Drug interaction information includes what other drugs the patient is taking. Consider someone traveling who picks up his prescription for foovoline from a different pharmacy that doesn't know he's taking blahmacillin already.

Re:a logic bomb?

[plover]

As far as I know, Medco doesn't provide comprehensive patient pharmaceutical information. I think all they do is offer the data sheet for foovoline, the one that warns you against taking it with blahmacillin. But they don't check to see if you have a prescription for blahmacillin or not. That's still up to your pharmacist, and unless you explicitly tell him or her, he or she has no way of knowing that you're getting blahmacillin from the pharmacy across the street.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. But my understanding of Medco (they're my company's prescription provider) is that they only pay the bills and sell the data sheet service.

Isn't being disgruntled...

[Billosaur]

...part of a sysadmin's job description?

Going Sysadmin

[sm62704]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

I, for one, would rather see dead servers than dead people. And, to put things in a different perspcctive, a friend's brother spent five years in a federal prison in the 1980s for loaning money to a dope dealer; the charge was "conspiracy to distribute cocaine".

What does more damage, loaning monsy to a drug dealer or wiping hundreds of people's medical records? If it had been financial data I might be a bit more sympathetic to the dumbass suicide logic bomber, but I know I'd be pissed if all my medical records were lost.

Re:Going Sysadmin

[isa-kuruption]

Yes, but in this case, we are talking about dead people.

The result of the bomb on the server infrastructure would have caused patients to not have their life-saving prescriptions delivered thus putting their health at risk. So, if it had gone off, it is possible there could have been deaths due to his actions.

Re:Going Sysadmin

[Tony Hoyle]

Unlikely. People with life saving prescriptions usually make sure they're up to date a couple of weeks in advance (some of the stuff I take has horrid withdrawl symptoms and I mustn't go more than a day without it - I'm always at least a week in advance of it, since remember doctors/pharmacies don't work weekends and holidays so you're out of contact at least 2 days a week anyway). For those that 'forgot' there are emergency procedures, where a pharmacist can issue a drug without prescription given sufficient proof that the drug is required immediately (I've seen this done several times with asthma patients that forget their inhalers. Turning blue in the chemist is apparently sufficient proof :p).

Basically, the system isn't that finely balanced that a day or two without a central system would kill people. It would be inconvenient, and all non-urgent prescriptions would just have to wait, but not life threatening.

Re:Going Sysadmin

[sm62704]

I'm not for commuting the guy's sentence, as I responded in another comment. But erasing medical records, while dastardly and dangerous, isn't quite a breathtakingly shocking as shooting a dozen people dead within a fifteen minute time span.

Re:Going Sysadmin

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ man. You have a lady friend in prison for being a dopehead... your friend's brother was involved with a cocaine dealer... anything else we should know about? What's up with you and the fucking drugs?

Why do you hire prostitutes? Are you ugly? I am, too :-(

Re:Going Sysadmin

[sm62704]

What's up with you and the fucking drugs?

Look out your window. See that guy with the necktie? He's on drugs, his drug dealer is Walgreens. See that black guy without a necktie? He's on drugs too, but his don't come from walgreens. See that white guy without a necktie? He's on drugs too. He gets his from the black guy.

My favorite drugs in order of emjoyment:

• aspirin (I have arthritis)
  
• caffiene (coffee, Pepsi)
  
• Alcohol (beer, whiskey)
  
• Reefer
  
• Beano

I hire prostitutes because I like to fuck and non-prostitute women aren't attracted to nerds. I don't just hire them, I'm friends with quite a few hookers I don't even have sex with!

Re:Going Sysadmin

[Richthofen80]

What does it matter if the effect kills someone or not? Effectively, you're killing the other employees by forcing them into emergency mode. You're also jeopardizing the company by forcing its financial assets into paying for costly recovery, overtime, etc.

If I spent 5 years building a business, poured my heart and soul into it, and one of my employees destroys the information infrastructure that I used to help build the business, doesn't he owe me for my efforts, which have now been destroyed? 2.5 years sounds right; It may have taken that long to build that medical system. They may have spent 2.5 man-years recovering from the bomb.

Dead man switch

[INeededALogin]

We all have thought about planting a Dead Man Switch. The difference between us and this guy is the same difference between saying you want to kill someone and actually doing it. This guy sucks and deserves prison and to be banned from the workplace. As a Unix Engineer who has survived and been part of layoffs in the past, this type of person is not fair to the rest of the team. If you aren't gonna be the best, don't put scripts in place to punish the people that are.

The saving grace in this case was not the guy who found the script(he of course milked it for what it was worth), but the fact that this guy did things half-assed. His original script had a bug in it(not tested)... these are the same reasons that he probably lost his job to the better people on the team when the cuts came.

Label me a troll if you want... but this guy was trash and is where he belongs.

Re:Dead man switch

[Critical Facilities]

the fact that this guy did things half-assed. His original script had a bug in it(not tested)...

Not only that, the loser had the "D Day" set to his own birthday. I'm not condoning or defending this type of thing, but if you're going to do it, do it well and for crying out loud, don't leave a trail of friggin' bread crumbs leading right to you.

Re:Dead man switch

[Angst Badger]

Honestly, getting off with 30 months and an $80k fine actually seems kind of light considering the hysteria that has surrounded this kind of thing in recent years. He's lucky he didn't end up being convicted under the draconian "terrorism" statutes that can now be applied to computer crimes. And while I have a certain perverse sympathy for revenge tactics, the fact is that these were medical insurance systems, and the loss of data wouldn't have just hurt the company, it would have hurt customers who depended on the company for their medical care. That's just not cool.

Re:Dead man switch

[Anonymous Coward]

these are the same reasons that he probably lost his job to the better people on the team when the cuts came.

According to the fine article, Lin did NOT lose his job. It appears he was afraid that he would lose his job and so placed the logic bomb...

Re:Dead man switch

[sammy baby]

If you aren't gonna be the best, don't put scripts in place to punish the people that are.

I don't want to take issue with the main gist of your post, with which I agree 100%. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that surviving a round of layoffs necessarily means that you're one of "the best." I've seen plenty of competent folks get laid off while incompetent ones stay on for one reason or another.

Re:Dead man switch

[techno-vampire]

Not only that, the loser had the "D Day" set to his own birthday. I'm not condoning or defending this type of thing, but if you're going to do it, do it well and for crying out loud, don't leave a trail of friggin' bread crumbs leading right to you.

I agree. If you're going to do something like that, do it right! Everybody knows D Day is June 6!

Re:Dead man switch

[MadMidnightBomber]

I *am* the best - that's why they haven't found my scripts.

Seriously, someone accidentally deleted /vmunix and /genvmunix on one of our DEC boxes. Works fine until you reboot. Did I mention it was at a remote site?

Re:Dead man switch

[mccrew]

His original script had a bug in it(not tested)... these are the same reasons that he probably lost his job to the better people on the team when the cuts came.

What is interesting, perhaps even mind boggling, is that it appears that he hadn't lost his job. When his birthday rolled around in 2004 and the logic bomb didn't fire due to the bug, he was able to apply a fix and reset it for his birthday in 2005! You'd think that he wouldn't want to be around when it went off.

Bugs cost for real

[carnalforge]

Of course only if the gulty one is not a company.

wow, that's harsh

[jollyreaper]

I would like to give this admin credit for not just walking into the place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random.

I've heard some tales of the disgruntled from back in the day. The most common "I quit" sabotage was taking the reel-to-reel's from the library and dumping them in a sink with water. But the worst worst worst one I heard of, one that could even be an urban legend because of how evil it is, it was the revenge of an angry admin who wanted the company to pay dearly for the evils visited upon him. He sets up this program that doesn't run until several months after he leaves the company. Note, this is back in the days of tapes and computer operators who worked the night shift and moved the tapes from one drive to another, 1970-somethings. Anyway, what his program did was step through EVERY tape in the library. He shuffled it in a random order so nobody would become suspicious. The operator just follows the prompting on his terminal, never the wiser. By the time the sequence is complete, every tape has been erased. As the story goes, the company had no offsite backups and was ruined.

Revenge fantasies are fun but seriously, a job is a job. If you go out in a blaze of glory at one, it will make finding the next one a lot more difficult, especially with a felony on your record. But I guess if he was thinking clearly we wouldn't be reading about this in the first place.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[greenfield]

I would like to give this admin credit for not just walking into the place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random. I wouldn't. I think a minimum qualification for participating in our society is knowing that "walking into a place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random" is wrong. What's next? Giving people credit for not spitting on people who annoy them?

I have been angry at work. I took a more reasonable approach: I quit and found a different job.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[jollyreaper]

I wouldn't. I think a minimum qualification for participating in our society is knowing that "walking into a place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random" is wrong. What's next? Giving people credit for not spitting on people who annoy them?

I have been angry at work. I took a more reasonable approach: I quit and found a different job. That comment was tongue in cheek. One would also think that the minimum qualification for employment in our society is knowing that you can't vandalize company property even if you think they really dicked you over.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[ArhcAngel]

I think a minimum qualification for participating in our society is knowing that "walking into a place with a high-powered assault rifle and shooting at random" is wrong.

You must be new here.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[R2.0]

"high-powered assault rifle "

Quibble from a gun nut: that phrase is an oxymoron. Every weapon the media calls an "assault rifle" uses a small caliber or mid powered cartridge - mainly .223 Remington for AR-15 type or 7.62x39 for AK/SKS style. That was the whole point behind the development of military assault rifles - smaller cartriges with less range to be used in closer quarters. The firearm is lighter, easier to control, and a soldier can carrier a higher ammo load.

"High Power" is .308 or 30-06 class - these are large rifles, that kick HARD, and are harder to control. Rifles of this class are termed "main battle rifles": M1 Garand, M14, Fn-Fal, H&K G3. I'm not sure ANY of these types of firearms have been used in any of the mass killings that the media so love.

Then there is the whole semi- vs. full auto thing, but that's for another flameworthy Slashdot day.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[ConceptJunkie]

I got laid off from AOL a while back. No need for revenge, they are doing it to themselves. There are a ton of smart people at that company (despite the fact that most of them quit), but fortunately, management is proficient enough to keep anything productive they could do from actually making a difference.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[afidel]

I read a supposedly true story of an admin who planted a logic bomb and placed a high powered magnet in the tape drive, as they loaded tapes to restore they were actually erasing them! Wouldn't work on modern media due to the high magnetic field needed to flip bits but back in the day it would have created havoc and would have guaranteed that at least some of the most recent data was lost.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[sabt-pestnu]

A friend of mine related to me that his boss asked him, "If you come into the office shooting people at random, could you start at the front so I can get away?"

His reply: "If I come into the office shooting people, it won't be at random."

The scary part is that neither one was joking. Yes, Virginia, work environments really can get that toxic.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[celle]

"I quit and found a different job. "

That choice doesn't always exist. Especially when you have dependents and bills to pay and the job you have just barely makes it.

Re:wow, that's harsh

[JavaRob]

"I quit and found a different job."

That choice doesn't always exist. Especially when you have dependents and bills to pay and the job you have just barely makes it. Right -- this guy's going to have a much easier time supporting his dependents now that he is in prison and has basically thrown his entire remaining career off a cliff. He can't even legally work with computers at all for a few years (even as a temp receptionist or some crap job like that!), and after that it's still going to be awfully hard to find an employer.

Or were you arguing that the high-powered rifle rampage has a better chance of feeding the kids?
Huh -- not unless you're strapping your kills to the roof of the car and firing up the BBQ.

Seriously, I agree that walking out isn't always the best option, but it's always going to be a hell of a lot smarter than trying to violently destroy your employer or fellow employees.

Probably never

[bickle]

"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"

First, people would need to know they exist. Second, they'd need a vague, rudimentary knowledge of what a sysadmin does.

So, probably never.

Sophisticated Attack

[conureman]

The code didn't work, but Lin took the bold precaution of not properly labeling it as "maliciouscode.exe". Save the children!

Go easy on a fellow geek.

[Anonymous Coward]

"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"

About the same amount of time it takes to say that the sentence was too harsh.

Re:There's an interesting story...

[Anonymous Coward]

because you didn't submit the story when it was hot

ITSALLYOURFAULTFUCKER

How long will it take?

[cgenman]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Exactly as long as it takes for someone at ABC to go postal and delete Barbara Walter's files.

Can't fire me

[Thelasko]

You can't fire me! Because I removed this from the transmitter and only I know where it goes.

Logic Bomb

[xirtap]

This sounds like something out of a bad movie. "Oh no, I found a logic bomb on one of the servers, what do we do?" "Well a logic bomb will try to explode itself and take out all the files! If we reconfigure it, we *may* be able to make it implode on it's own files!" "Oh MacGruber, is there nothing you can't do?"

Re:Logic Bomb

[Tony Hoyle]

Isn't that a Stargate Atlantis plot? The one I watched last night in fact..

Scary.

Re:life imprisonment for failing to accept reality

[0100010001010011]

Ok, I've seen this in about every thread on slashdot for the last few weeks.

WTF does it mean? I mean I don't have a problem with people pushing a political agenda in Spam, but I have a hard enough time following the post. I think it's Anti-Bush, but then we have some stuff like Global Warming thrown in.

To the AC, clean up your wording and maybe more people will listen.

life-threatening?

[sholden]

"""
Liebermann noted that if the bomb had taken down Medco's network, people using a Medco prescription card would not have been able to fill any new prescriptions. "That could be very serious, maybe even life-threatening, depending on the need for that medication," Liebermann said.
"""

So what happens when they have a network failure for some other reason? Bad hardware, power outage, building fire, comet impact...

Re:life-threatening?

[isa-kuruption]

Redundant systems, geographically dispersed disaster recovery sites... solves that problem. Doesn't solve the system administrator problem, who most likely sysadmins both the primary and disaster recovery sites.

Re:life-threatening?

[Just Some Guy]

So what happens when they have a network failure for some other reason? Bad hardware, power outage, building fire, comet impact...

Intent is a big part of the law and always has been. If I accidentally run over you with my car, the punishment will be much less severe than if I was aiming at you.

Re:life-threatening?

[afidel]

Yet another use for WORM backup media?

Re:life-threatening?

[darkmeridian]

Well, what's the difference between me intentionally running a dude over and accidentally hitting him? That's the difference between an accident, negligence, and an intentional act, and our criminal justice system recognizes this.

Malfunctioning DRM and other logic bombs

[dpbsmith]

Faulty DRM and "software activation" schemes are logic bombs, too.

There is of course a a very important difference, in that they are not intended to do anything but enforce the bombers' legal rights. Or, at any rate, what the bombers credibly believe to be their legal rights.

But when a malfunctioning Microsoft server trips the "kill" switch on legitimate copies of Vista, I think it's fair to call that a logic bomb of sorts.

No, I don't think Bill Gates should do 2.5 years of jail time, but it is disappointing that Microsoft was not held accountable for this beyond a few weeks' of mildly embarrassing publicity.

UNIxBOMBER?

[Anonymous Coward]

UNIxBOMBER?

Disgruntled sysadmins vs. disgruntled postmen

[aquatone282]

What, sysadmins show up with with a flash drive instead of a firearm?

Re:Disgruntled sysadmins vs. disgruntled postmen

[cybvapor]

Heck, why not both?

Re:There's an interesting story...

[sm62704]

I read this same comment yesterday in the RIAA story. Why is Anonymous Coward so behind lately?

Sounds about right

[Sounder40]

The story's author and the prosecuting attorney point out that this involved risk to patients and not just a company's finances. However, I think it's simpler than that: If I worked at, say, a guitar shop, and I took a hammer to the guitars in the shop, that's destruction of the shop's assets. For Medco, their assets include the customer/patient data. Destruction of the assets is a crime. Whether it was done with a computer or a hammer is insignificant.

On a separate subject entirely, that ComputerWorld web page is exactly what's gone wrong with the web: The content I wanted to see (the article) is spread out over three pages, and each page only contains approx. 10% of the content I want to see. The other 90% of the page contains shit, and probably blinky shit if I wasn't using Firefox and Adblock Plus. I don't know why web sites do that. Do they actually think they're adding value? Another one on the list of web sites to avoid...

Re:Sounds about right

[TheSkyIsPurple]

>The content I wanted to see (the article) is spread out over three pages, and each page only contains approx. 10% of the content I want to see.

So, They are only giving you 30% of the content total? You missed out on more than 2/3 of the article? Ouch.

> Do they actually think they're adding value?

If those extra ad-views are generating enough revenue to allow them to continue publishing the articles and pay the authors, then the answer would be yes, they think they are.

At least they're nice enough to still have a "Print this page" link which bypasses much of that.

No, no...

[johndiii]

Fear and appease the mighty systems administrator, lest he make thy coffee holder retract at random and spilleth thy coffee all over thy desk and thy pants, causing much consternation and stains that are really hard to get out.

It's all fun and games

[MikeRT]

Until a doctor needs that healthcare information, prescribes the wrong treatment, and ends up killing someone based on ignorance due to the records this bastard destroyed.

The bastard should've gotten the max sentence

[s_p_oneil]

He's not just trying to hurt the company he works for, he's trying to hurt the millions of people impacted by the data loss. How much time and money would clients of this company waste trying to rebuild it? How many people may suffer, or perhaps even die, because they can't fill their prescriptions? Seriously, if there's a chance anyone could've died from it, they should've brought extra charges up for that, too.

Re:There's an interesting story...

[Anonymous Coward]

minicity spam

God wanted you to die.

[FatSean]

'Act of god' or whatever. They will never take responsibility, only your money.

Zeitgeist

[adamziegler]

Zeitgeist... really? Don't get me wrong... its fun to say and all, and can make one sound intelligent when ordering french fries but.... really?

Proficient?

[Rick Genter]

From TFA:

Sentencing documents noted that in his role as systems administrator, Lin had access to Medco's network, which is made up of about 70 HP Unix servers, and that he was "proficient" in coding for them.

Obviously not...

Sorry, my bad

[Anonymous Coward]

When I saw "logic bomb" I thought Slashdot had started covering the elections.

The biggest threat is phyiscal damage of assets

[Shivetya]

I bet in most companies one baseball bat could bring most companies to their knees.

Why resort to a "logic bomb" which they will know who did it to just being direct?

Don't think so, many places I have been I could appear as a Heating and Cooling worker, electrician, or even trash disposal, and get unescorted access into the data center. All the security in the world doesn't do diddly when half of the IT department will let you in with "can you let me back in, my buddy can't hear me over the fans"

sysadmin in jail

[Anonymous Coward]

He's gonna have a hard time protecting his backdoor.

How long?

[KodaK]

"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"

Well, I think first a sysadmin has to, you know, kill someone. This incident does not even remotely compare with postal shootings. I'm all for hyperbole, but, fuck, it has to be within a couple of orders of magnitude.

Re:How long?

[One Childish N00b]

This will probably end up modded 'Redundant' because plenty of people have explained this before me, but you evidently missed all of those, so I'll take a chance and explain it again for you.

- Idiot deletes medical records because he's pissy he got fired.
- Doctor cannot access medical records for a patient who's unconscious, has been in a car crash or something.
- Paramedic makes a snap decision to treat unconscious patient with... I don't know, pick any drug you want that might be used to treat people in this situation that people might have an allergy to, because someone somewhere will.
- Patient has severe allergic reaction.
- Patient dies.

See also: The millions of other problems that erasing medical records causes for lots of innocent people. Anyone unlucky enough to have specific medical requirements that can't be accessed because of this idiot is just as dead as anyone unlucky enough to be at the water cooler when John Q. Moron opens fire in the corridor.

Re:How long?

[dosun88888]

People have a hard time with scale. The sysadmin guy is like Hitler, and the postal worker is like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.

Your average individual would be more afraid of Dahmer than Bundy, and both of them far more than A-Dog.

to answer your question...

[sammy baby]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Just wait until someone dies because an important piece of their medical history was missing at a critical time. I think that'll get the ball rolling.

(And no, I'm not looking forward to that.)

Desperation? Revenge?

[AndGodSed]

From TFA: Sentencing records also show that Lin began trading e-mails with his co-workers that September, discussing the anticipated layoffs. Then, in October, he sent an e-mail saying he was unsure whether he would survive the upcoming layoffs.

Desperation can make a dude do stupid things. Revenge coupled with an anticipated wrong is even worse.

Also:

The logic bomb initially was set up to be triggered on April 23, 2004 -- Lin's birthday -- but it failed to launch because of a coding error. In September 2004, Lin changed the code to fix the error and reset it to deploy on April 23, 2005.

During the sentencing hearing today, Lin's attorney argued that his client simply made a mistake. Liebermann, however, argued that this was far from a mistake. "We said a mistake is something you make once," he said. "You fly off the handle and make a mistake. He had from October 2003 to January 2005 to wipe it out and he didn't."


1. For once a coding error was A GOOD THING.
2. I agree with Liebermann's argument.
3. I wonder if a Psyche profile was done on this guy, he seems to be borderline... something...

hmmm

[Ogive17]

What would've been really cool is if the guy who found the code exclaimed "SOMEONE SET US UP THE LOGIC BOMB?!?!?"

Backups?

[D'Jacamo]

I think it'd be criminal if the company couldn't recover from the bomb in less than a day, or maybe a couple of days if they have to resort to off-site backups. If their system in so important ("life threatening" important) than they would have a backup system to deal with catastrophes of all types. Somehow I doubt that's true, though.

Re:Let's face it

[stevey]

Insightful? Pah!

I'm a sysadmin and I came to become one after working as a developer for a good many years.

There are the same interesting bits involved being a sysadmin, along with debugging plus you get to have a hell of a better budget!

The best part is I can still write code to automate jobs across the machines I maintain via puppet/cfengine..

Professional / Trade

[DeanFox]

Label me a troll if you want... but this guy was trash and is where he belongs. You're not a troll. I think maybe he should have got the 10 years. I wouldn't expect a doctor loosing his hospital privileges to start killing patients in revenge. There are some things, disgruntled or not, that you just don't do.

I say that and yet I feel for the guy. I've been disrespected by suits and have gone to sleep fantasizing about wiping a system. It felt good. But in the morning, I got up and went to work to get a job done.

Many in IT are bitter for good reason. Most of the IT in my area was layed off 9/12/2001 and a week later offered their jobs back at half what they were making. A few of my friends have trained their Indian offshore replacements. I see jobs advertised that want 5-7 years expert experience in 12 different programming languages, 10 different platforms and a four year degree with a starting salary less than a manager at McDonnalds would make.

What do you do... We're a new profession with growing pangs. It took a centry for doctors to fight off the mid-wife. Eventually, the world will come to accept that computers are important enough that they want the best people and will treat the Admin with the importance that work entails. It's starting. Google does it. Others do too. We'll get there.

-[d]-

Any sysadmin can be dangerous

[spikedvodka]

I don't care what kind of logical permissions scheme you have in place. any disgruntled (ob: Ever seen a gruntled sysadmin?) sysadmin can do massive damage even without the rights to do so. Physical Access is key.

in many data centers a small fire is enough to cause massive damage... smoke particles in hard drives, and (potentially) wet electronics

a "nicely" modified piece of cat5 can in some cases fry a switch

EPO button can be a pain to recover from

remove a drive

flash the bios with a bad bios-image

the options are endless

use your imagination

I wonder what she would have gotten if she had left a small incendiary device... on a timer could do the same thing.

As opposed to the shoddy yet normal practices

[gelfling]

SOX and HIPPA notwithstanding, providers do a horrible job of collecting and storing their own subscribers information. Everytime I go to a provider I have to fill out the same damn forms over and over. So - either they lose it or, they simply store everything and never look at it or check it. Even the AMA says more than a hundred thousand people a year die from bad records, incomplete information, negligence and inattention.

BTW I'm a Medco customer and what they think is an equivalent lower cost subscription without them being actual doctors, is I think, criminal. It's actually practicing medicine w/o a license.

Nervous System Re-org..Excellent! Fast too.

[CFD339]

As simple as a re-org? That's great news. Everyone who reads /. knows that from a management perspective, a re-org can solve any problem and only takes 90 days. After 90 days, all those problems are fixed and it is often time for another re-org to solve the next set of entirely different problems.

This may be frustrating for the patient, who will be totally unable to accomplish anything for the 30 days leading up to and the 30 days following the re-org; but hell, its not like they were going to run a marathon anyway. Just sit tight and you'll see, the re-org will be GOOD for your nervous system. Just the mention of a re-org makes everyone nervous.

Re:Let's face it

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for biting the troll.

Line between cyber/meat space is getting thinner

[Temujin_12]

As the the line between cyberspace and 'meatspace' becomes thinner and thinner malicious behavior in cyberspace will have more and more serious consequences in real people's lives (not just financially).

Seeing as how I'm currently on a commuter train headed into Seattle, imagine if the entire railway (tracks/trains) were automated by a central command center (which they aren't as each train has a human operator). A disgruntled employee who works at the command center leaves a program that causes damage to the computers in the command center and results in the collision of a commuter train. Suddenly, this theoretical line between cyber and 'meat' space doesn't seem to exist anymore.

This is very much true for the medical field. This data is in and of itself life saving as it provides doctors with the information they need to do their job, which after all is saving lives. Deliberately causing damage to medical infrastructure should be treated the same as deliberately sabotaging medical instruments in a hospital or doctors office. This person deserves all the jail time the law can give them and should be banned permanently from the technical industry.

Not gonna take it anymore

[kcdoodle]

I have been so angry at jobs I have left that I have been tempted to do bad things to the network/data/servers/etc.

Whenever leaving such a job, I have always taken the high road. I did the worst thing possible, I left them without telling them the REAL reason for leaving. This way they can hire more sysadmins who will also leave. Those companies will never get their stuff together!

BRWAHAHAHAHA!!!

guilty?

[fishbowl]

So he's guilty, right? He actually *did* it? No "innocent guy going to prison" story here?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:life imprisonment for failing to accept reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe http://slashdot.org/~philharhamica or http://slashdot.org/~dunkincorny? About the same level of incoherence.

"Going sysadmin"? Nah.

[John Hasler]

> How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the
> zeitgeist?

Forever. "Going sysadmin" just doesn't trip off the tongue the way "going postal" does.

Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent is a bit harsh, but there is a grain of truth to it. And I think sysadmins are not that popular, so it got modded up.

I think what's pretty clear from your post is that your bosses moved you out of programming because you weren't very good at it. Sorry but programming (and btw, it is "programming not "development". "Development" is effeminate, and probably includes other jobs not as manly as writing C code.) isn't really for everyone. Alas, someone has to clean the latrines, and so we have our sysadmins. Kudos to you for doing it!

Re:Ummm....

[misleb]

I think what's pretty clear from your post is that your bosses moved you out of programming because you weren't very good at it. Sorry but programming (and btw, it is "programming not "development". "Development" is effeminate, and probably includes other jobs not as manly as writing C code.) isn't really for everyone. Alas, someone has to clean the latrines, and so we have our sysadmins. Kudos to you for doing it!

Hey now, cleaning latrines is harder than it looks.

I would liken sysadmin more to being a plumber than a janitor. That isn't to say that there aren't "sysadmins" who are more or less just trained monkeys hitting the enter key when some script dictates that it must be done. Usually they are in some "enterprise" environment where they are not only allowed, but required to specialize in hitting "enter" key at the right moment. Similarlly, aren't there a lot of so-called developers who spend their days churning out mediocre, completely uninteresting VB.NET code?

-matthew

Re:Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Programming" is what Indian code monkeys do as well as those like yourself who will probably be replaced by them soon. "Development" is the end to end design and implementation of an entire software system. I realize it's not for everyone though, it's a fairly advanced stage in one's career. People like you who are content with merely "programming" are still needed to pound the nails once the blueprints have been made though, and hey, you speak English better than the Indians so I'm pulling to keep you on board too.

Re:Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, someone has to clean the latrines, and so we have our sysadmins. Kudos to you for doing it!

An apt metaphor given that crap that most programmers produce. For every 1 decent program there's a few thousand "code monkeys" randomly banging on keyboards until something that passes QA lurches out. Sysadmins are they ones stuck figuring out how build adobe houses out of what they produce.

I know I'm feeding trolls, but it seemed such an apt metaphor, sysadmins cleaning up the crap programmers produce, and the code monkeys thinking that makes them better than the zookeepers.

Re:Ummm....

[Iron Condor]

and hey, you speak English better than the Indians .

That would be unusual.

I have found the average Bangalore code monkey to be a much better English speaker/writer/communicator than the average American one. Yes, there are exceptions. No, they don't invalidate the rules.

Yes, the docs that come from India tend to sound a little goofy - what with their mangled pronouns and all. But compared to the semi-illiterate gibberish I get from the folks in the midwest (if I get anything from them at all!) it might as well be high prose. At least it usually addresses what needs to be addressed. Or at least it tries. As opposed to stuff that's not even "unclear" because it is just harebrained fad-junk.

Thank you for documenting which "design pattern" you implemented here and how elegant this makes the design, but why is it a hundred times slower then what we need and why didn't you work on improving that? Your Indian colleague wrote twice as much documentation and half of that was analysis of the speed bottlenecks. And he had fewer typos because he knows how to use a spell-checker. Allowing me to read his stuff twice as fast. And he works when I sleep, so his stuff is available when I come to work in the morning, not in the evening when I'd like to go home. And he works for 1/2 your salary...

Re:Ummm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, hi troll food.

A _Real_ Operator ...

[darkuncle]

1. wouldn't have been fired in the first place, and if he was fired,
2. wouldn't have been caught, and if he was caught,
3. wouldn't have been prosecuted.

This guy was merely a pretender to the title, and clearly was not familiar with the extensive body of work on the subject. No true Bastard would ever allow such a demeaning sequence of events to occur under his tenure ...

Nice work if you can get it

[MillionthMonkey]

I once worked for a guy who had to maintain some code that a consultant had written several months before. (Ironically this was at a place that handled medical records.) He stumbled across a logic bomb in the consultant's code that hadn't gone off yet. I forget the details but he said it was some sort of obfuscated routine that used a number of inputs, including the timestamp, to produce its outputs, and the timestamp was a legitimate input needed by the routine for real reasons. It was being manipulated with some goofy number in some way to cause an overflow on a certain date, which was still several months away.

So he figures, oh, it's a logic bomb, and not being terribly intrigued by it enough to study it, he just kicked up the number to push the deadline back by a century and left it at that.

Three or four days after the bomb was set to go off, they got a phone call from the guy asking if they had any work for him.

Re:Nice work if you can get it

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Wow. Any reason why you guys didn't report the consultant to management? He probably did it before and without being punished will probably do so again.

Sounds like a shady car mechanic who loosens a few bolts when you bring your car in for repairs.

Re:Nice work if you can get it

[MillionthMonkey]

Any reason why you guys didn't report the consultant to management?

The management was really bad at this place. They failed to negotiate correctly with a guy who did their stupid Flash demo (this was around 1999), so he only had to provide them with a binary. Once their phone number changed they had to make another deal with him and he was able to negotiate from a position of strength.

Re:Nice work if you can get it

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Ironically/Coincidentally/

Re:Nice work if you can get it

[bill_mcgonigle]

Three or four days after the bomb was set to go off, they got a phone call from the guy asking if they had any work for him.

It sounds like you found a real scumbag, but a time limit on software isn't an unusual feature. I've worked on experimental medical device software in which I routinely put a time limit on new versions because it wasn't validated by an FDA process and wasn't to escape the lab. The time limit was just an extra control to ensure it didn't run away or get accidentally deployed.

Is that a logic bomb? If some idiot took the code and put it into production, he'd probably think so. If I was ensuring the process was properly validated, of course not.

Re:Nice work if you can get it

[Macgrrl]

I used to work for an economics professor who was interested in computers. He had worked for a number of major banks over the years, and at one major bank he had spent sometime examining some of the code for one of the back of house systems to improve is understanding of programming.

This particular system had a history of falling over every couple of months and the bank would have to call in a specialist consultant who maintained it. The Eco Prof found a section of code which he didn't understand, and asked one of the banks' full time programmers to explain it to him.

It turned out the consultant had left a logic bomb in the problem which would go off every 60-90 days (he reset it with a random period each time he came in) requiring 'the specialist' to be called in to fix the problem at contracting rates.

The bank staff removed that section of code and the consultant got no more work from them.

Annoy-o-Tron

[Jason Levine]

He would have been much better off just planting an Annoy-o-Tron in the server room somewhere before leaving.

Re:Annoy-o-Tron

[El_Oscuro]

I have one of those, waiting for the right time. It wouldn't work in the server room though. Too noisy. Much better in the PHB's office.

Weakly typed languages saves the day

[sproketboy]

FTFA: "It was designed to trigger at a certain time and date. That didn't happen, though. The first time the logic bomb was set to go off, a coding error kept it from working."

Weakly typed languages saves the day again! We don't need no stinking types! ;)

meatheadspace

[Gription]

. . .

The real panic for the public happens only when individuals fear for their lives.

This is basically the exact reason that Homeland Security is the biggest terrorist organization in the US.

(The news media is right up there though...)

Re:meatheadspace

[ScentCone]

This is basically the exact reason that Homeland Security is the biggest terrorist organization in the US.

Do you want to be burned alive? No? Do you take any precautions to avoid that? Does your city or county require sprinklers in commercial buildings? Is your local fire chief "the biggest terrorist" in your town, because he's the guy that has to make the case on that sort of thing, and deal with the consequences? Are the local EMTs that go to schools and talk about what it's like to scrape up teenage drinkers from the side of the road "terrorists," from your point of view? Is a guy who got to spend time scraping people off the walls of a Madrid train station, and now talks about it in a preventative way a terrorist? Are you perhaps completely missing the point?

I forgot

[coulbc]

Maybe he just forgot the "where" clause in his SQL Statement?

Re:Let's face it

[COMON$]

And all CS grad students are people who cannot hack the real world and want to postpone it for a few more years. This argument can go on and on. Who the hell modded you insightful for a post that is redundant at best?

Re:Let's face it

[COMON$]

Some of the best sysadmins I know are ex-developers. The worst happen to be tinkerers who were in the right place at the right time who fit the aforementioned description. Its OK, cause as a sysadmin I make good money fixing networks that another sysadmin botched up.

But I agree with you, I was a CS graduate that decided to head for the Network Engineering/Sys Admin field because the work was more interesting to me. Not saying that dev work isn't interesting, it is just not my cup o tea.

Every once in a while I consider heading back to dev work when I get tired of everyone watching every thing I do and having an opinion on it. Devs seem to have the enigma feel in the departments I have worked in. No one really knows what they do on an hour by hour basis except for their peers, they get to test things before they are live and if they make a mistake it is just considered standard debugging. Whereas as a Sysadmin, if someone's e-mail gets routed to junk mail you get put on the most wanted list for months.

His failure is not immaterial

[vinn01]

If you shot a person with a gun and...

a) your aim is good and they die = manslaughter or murder
b) your aim is poor (or medical care is superb) and they don't die = assult with a deadly weapon or attempted murder.

Even if "b" leaves them a veggie, you still can't be charged with murder.

Success or failure makes is big difference in crime and sentencing.

Re:His failure is not immaterial

[jjohnson]

You would be charged with *attempted* murder, if, had you died, a murder charge was supported. Generally speaking, "attempted" crimes draw the same penalty as successful crimes except when the attempt hasn't progressed all the way, such that failure is the difference.

In other words, if I plot to kill you (first degree murder) but miss when I start shooting (or hit you non-fatally), I'm not going to get a reduced sentence just because I wasn't successful.

Fresh Meat...

[quickpick]

I can see all those other jailed sysadmins and rogue coders heckling Yung-Hsun Lin as he walks down the cell block
"WOOHOO! I'm gonna debug you SO bad you'll call me daddy!"
"Hey...hey you! You got purddy hands, want to play with my mouse??"
"Lets be friends...I got servers...pretty unprotected servers...ooooohh...dirty servers..."

Personally

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer my postal workers and sysadmins gruntled with sprig of margarita.

Blue-collar crime versus white-collar crime

[Dekortage]

This is kind of like the difference between blue-collar and white-collar crime. If I physically break into your house and steal a thousand dollars of property, it's blue-collar. If I intentionally falsify tax documents and earnings statements in order to pump up my company's stock value, then cash out for millions of dollars while you and the other stockholders are left holding the bag, it's white-collar.

Both are crimes. The first appears more "meatspace" than the second, but the consequences of the second are much broader and longer lasting -- even in the physical world. If I lose thousands of dollars in investments, it's as good as you stealing it out of my house. If I die because you destroy my medical data, leading to some kind of fatal treatment, you might as well have shot me. And even if nobody would have died, there are still other Very Bad Consequences, like patients becoming developing new conditions as the result of wrong medication (possibly leading to lifelong problems). And there is the small issue of all the MedCo employees losing their jobs, and thousands of hospitals and clinics become snarled up in treatment schedules. This one little thing could easily impact millions of people overnight.

I agree that planting a logic bomb is not the same thing as shooting somebody. It is a different thing; in fact, it's a new kind of sinister that was not even possible a hundred years ago. But it might be just as bad as "going postal."

Re:Blue-collar crime versus white-collar crime

[mabhatter654]

the sentence seems reasonable considering the damage was planned and not carried out. In this case the guy got LESS time than if he had physically damaged 70 servers worth of property. The sentence was of REASONABLE and comparative length to what you'd get for malicious destruction of property say busting up cars on a lot or something, but it wasn't over the top either, with extensions and circumstances to inflate the crime because it was "on a computer" and the law can't understand that.

Re:Let me guess ... at infinity

[pbhj]

> I may have a simpler way:
> distance remaining (s) = 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 ... a_n = 1/2^(n-1)
> lim_(n->infinity) 1/2^(n-1) = 0.

> So, the object reaches its target :)

Yes, at infinity, how long does it take to get to infinity again? So the object doesn't reach its target?

Re:Let's face it

[Anonymous Coward]

Good observation! Like Sergey Brin and Larry Page...

How long before...

[Orig_Club_Soda]

THis guy should watch the movie "Office Space"

As long as I get my prozac.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't give a damn about them but the moment this sysadmin don't get his happy pills then the other sysadmin has nothing to worry about.....

Obligatory

[COMON$]

WHOOOOOSH!

Yes that was the sound of something going over your head.
Let me explain since you seem to be new. The conversation you tried to start goes something like this:

Person with a Grad degree: If you didn't go to grad school you are a hack.
Person without Grad degree: Grad school is for people who cant hack it in the real world.
Person with a Grad degree: People who go to grad school are more dedicated and have more sucess like _Insert obscenely long list of grad heroes here_.
Person without Grad degree Oh yea well what about _Insert obcenely long list of non-grad heroes here_.
And the conversation degrades from here until Godwin's Law is declared as that is the only end to the pissing match.

The same conversation goes on with professionals with degrees and professionals without any degree, professionals with job related degrees and professionals without job related degrees. BTW I am a BS married to an MS going for her PHD. So we hear this conversation a lot.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It must feel very castrating to have only a B.S. while your wife gets her Ph.D. Sort of like her wearing a strap on, day in and day out. But hey, if you like it in the ass, more power to you!

Now stop reading /. and get back in the kitchen and get dinner ready bitch!

Re:Obligatory

[COMON$]

OK that made me laugh!

A similar case of sabotage

[kbahey]

About 10 years or so ago, there was a customer of ours who used UNIX systems.

According to an email exchange with a friend, here is what happened.

A few people there shared administrative access. One of them created a cron entry that started a series of file removals. The backup operator did not validate the backups well too.

When this was discovered, the cron job was killed, and a fairly recent backup was restored. The missing transactions were reposted.

The case was closed and tighter security measures were implemented.

In this case, there was no real damage done, except for the wasted time and effort. No one was punished.

Health care info IS meatspace.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?

Only when disgruntled sysadmins start damaging meatspace.

I think a point is being missed here:

Damage to healthcare information IS damage to meatspace.

Whether it's actual health records or administrative databases (like appointment information, billing, supplies inventory and restock ordering, etc.), fouling the data can foul the medical treatment - causing incorrect treatment or delaying it when such a delay can be permanently damaging or fatal.

Prison time for planting a "logic bomb" intended to delete such data? HELL yes!

No one would die.

[Professor Fate]

This is a property crime. If prescription information couldn't be gotten through the computer, someone might have had to call a doctor or possibly even go to a hospital.

I really doubt anyone would die. As someone else pointed out, the same situation could occur from a power outage. Remember recently when the whole northeast of the USA was dark? I had no lights for 24 hours or so. No one died here. I know hospitals have generators but I'm sure the data network was affected. If necesary, doctors can still read and write on clipboards.

Man's best friend - Sysadmin?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the first thing I do in a new project, job, company - make friends with one of the Sysadmins.
It helps in
- getting faster turnaround on trouble tickets / requests
- keeping your practical IT infrastructure knowledge updated (which Cisco or Juniper routers are coming in next)

A long time

[Master of Transhuman]

"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"

Based on this moron.

Read the Ars Technica article on this idiot. First he planted the logic bomb because he thought he was going to be fired. Then after he wasn't fired, he tried to disable it, but failed. Then he decided to set it off anyway. Then it failed to do what it was supposed to do.

As Ars Technica put it, "You are not Zero Cool."

Well, what can you expect from an HP/UX sys admin?

Not Postal, E-POSTAL!

[bratwiz]

E-Postal-- you know, put a little BLAM in that SPAM!

Re:"Going sysadmin"? Nah.

[gr8scot]

And, to make it a catchier phrase, "going sysadmin" would need to be truncated, which would result in something like "going syssy," which already has a meaning that will never scare anybody.

Serius Sam 2: Serious quote

[eknagy]

Serius Damage!
Long-term weapon for long-term realtions!

Conscription of Labor

[bill_mcgonigle]

People have been fighting and dying since 1215 AD to get the right to trial by jury. We're lucky to have it.

Yes, but we've also been fighting for freedom, and if somebody doesn't want to do it, they ought not be enslaved.

The system is dumb - somebody who feels like doing some jury duty can't even call up and volunteer. Plenty of retirees would enjoy the work.

I currently have another year or two on my exemption from jury duty because I'm self employed. The Judge told me I had to grow my company and have some employees by time the exemption expired. Since when did the government have that right?