Logic Bomb - Attempted Logic Bombs

Attempted Logic Bombs

• In February 2000, Tony Xiaotong, indicted before a grand jury, was accused of planting a logic bomb during his employment as a programmer and securities trader at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. The bomb, planted in 1996, had a trigger date of July 20, 2000, but was discovered by other programmers in the company. Removing and cleaning up after the bomb allegedly took several months.
• On October 2, 2003 Yung-Hsun Lin, also known as Andy Lin, changed code on a server at Medco Health Solutions Inc. Fair Lawn, New Jersey headquarters, where he was employed as a Unix administrator, creating a logic bomb set to go off on his birthday in 2004. It failed to work due to a programming error, so Lin corrected the error and reset it to go off on his next birthday, but it was discovered and disabled by a Medco computer systems administrator a few months before the trigger date. Lin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in jail in a federal prison in addition to $81,200 in restitution. The charges held a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of US$250,000.
• In June 2006 Roger Duronio, a disgruntled system administrator for UBS, was charged with using a logic bomb to damage the company's computer network, and with securities fraud for his failed plan to drive down the company's stock with activation of the logic bomb. Duronio was later convicted and sentenced to 8 years and 1 month in prison, as well as a $3.1 million restitution to UBS.
• On 29 October, 2008 a logic bomb was discovered at American mortgage giant Fannie Mae. The bomb was allegedly planted by Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, an Indian citizen and IT contractor who worked in Fannie Mae's Urbana, Maryland facility. The bomb was set to activate on 31 January, 2009 and could have wiped all of Fannie Mae's 4000 servers. Makwana had been terminated around 1:00pm on 24 October, 2008 and managed to plant the bomb before his network access was revoked. Makwana was indicted in a Maryland court on 27 January, 2009 for unauthorized computer access, convicted on October 4, 2010, and sentenced to 41 months in prison on December 17, 2010.
• In October 2009, Douglas Duchak was terminated from his job as data analyst at the TSA’s Colorado Springs Operations Center (CSOC). Surveillance cameras captured images of Duchak entering the facility after hours loading a logic bomb onto a CSOC server that stored data from the U.S. Marshals. In January 2011, Duchak was sentenced to two years prison, $60,587 in fines, and three years probation. At his sentencing, Duchak tearfully apologized as his lawyer noted that at the time of the incident, Duchak's wife was pregnant with their second child. The judge at the sentencing mentioned that this logic bomb planting "incident was an anomaly in an otherwise untarnished work history."