30 months prison for logic bomber

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 10 January 2008 01:38

Your IT - Home IT

A former systems administrator in the US has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for planting a logic bomb in his then employer's sytems.

Yung-Hsun (Andy) Lin worked for Medco Health Systems in 2003 but feared being laid off following a restructuring and developed a script to delete multiple databases stored on Medco's servers.

The code was designed to run automatically on his next birthday (April 23, 2004). Lin was kept on when other sysadmins were retrenched, and although he did not remove the code it failed to run due to programming errors.

He subsequently modified to code to execute on April 23, 2005, but one of Lin's colleagues found and disabled the script in January 2005.

Medco is a prescription drug benefit manager, so any outage may have prevented prescriptions being dispensed.

Lin's sentence is believed to be the longest federal prison term imposed on someone found guilty of criminal damage to computer systems.

Additionally, he must pay $US81,200 restitution to Medco and faces a further two years of supervised release when he leaves prison.

And if there was any chance of Lin resuming his IT career by finding someone prepared to employ him despite his record, the court has effectively put paid to that by forbidding him from working on computers in prison or during the supervision period. After that, he'll be in his mid-50s and his skills will be four years out of date.