2.5 Years in Jail for Planting 'Logic Bomb' 303
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?
Re:Going Sysadmin (Score:4, Informative)
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:seems fair, but... (Score:4, Informative)
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:Let's face it (Score:2, Informative)
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..
Re:seems fair, but... (Score:3, Informative)
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:Nice work if you can get it (Score:1, Informative)