Programmer From Hell Plants Logic Bombs to Guarantee Future Work

upnorth

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Jul 27, 2015
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If you’ve spent any time working with computer programmers then you’ve probably been part of a project that, for one reason or another, just seems to have too many bugs. No matter what you do, you can’t make progress: there’s always more bugs, more rework and more bugs. At some dark moment, as frustration at the lack of progress gnaws away at you, you may wonder: what if the programmers are adding the bugs deliberately?
In this story the barrel bears a Siemens logo and our apple is contractor David Tinley, who recently pleaded guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. According to filings by the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania : TINLEY, intentionally and without Siemens’ knowledge and authorization, inserted logic bombs into computer programs that he designed for Siemens. These logic bombs caused the programs to malfunction after the expiration of a certain date. As a result, Siemens was unaware-of the cause of the malfunctions and required TINLEY to fix these malfunctions.

The logic bombs left by Tinley were bugs designed to cause problems in future, rather than at the time he added them. He might have done this to avoid looking like the cause of the kind of grinding, bug-riddled, non-progress I described at the beginning. Or perhaps he thought Siemens was less like to give up on buggy code that’s been deployed than code that’s still in development. Law360 reports that he would fix the bugs by resetting the date the logic bombs were due to go off, and that his attorney argued he did this to guard his proprietary code rather than to make money. It goes on to describe how Tinley was exposed after being forced to give others access to his code while he was on vacation. Siemens, it says, had to fix the the buggy system without him in order to put a time sensitive order through it. According to court filings, Tinley worked as contractor for Siemens for fourteen years, between 2002 and 2016, and engaged in his unorthodox income protection scheme for the last two.
 

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