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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?
Attempted Physics? I think not!
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.
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...
-I only code in BASIC.-
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.
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.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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...
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
I have been angry at work. I took a more reasonable approach: I quit and found a different job.
--Sam
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...)