Siemens Contractor Pleads Guilty to Planting ‘Logic Bomb’ in Spreadsheets

David Tinley, a 62-year-old resident of Harrison City,
Pennsylvania, was hired by Siemens as a contract employee for
Monroeville, Pennsylvania location, in 2002 to create custom
automated spreadsheets for various Siemens projects related to the
power generation industry.

However, according to the United States Justice Department (DoJ), Tinley
intentionally and without the company’s knowledge or authorization
inserted “logic bombs” into computer programs that caused glitches
in the spreadsheet after the expiration of a certain date.

Logic Bomb is a piece of computer code intentionally inserted
into software or system to carry out specific operations like crash
or malfunction after certain conditions are met, or an amount of
time has expired.

For years logic bombs went off and spreadsheets glitched, and
Siemens would recall Tinley and pay him to fix the problems with
the spreadsheets that the company used to manage orders for
electrical equipment.

At that point, Tinley would just fix the issue by resetting the
clock, invoice for his time, and then wait for the program to go
wrong again, Law360^[2] reports.

However, things did not remain the same for Tinley on May 2016
when he was out of state for a vacation, and Siemens had to put in
an urgent order, but a glitch in the spreadsheet occurred
again.

At that point, Tinley was forced to hand over the administrator
password to Siemens employees in order to unlock the spreadsheet
for editing. It was then when he got caught when other employees of
the company found the logic bombs in the sheet’s scripts.

David Tinley was indicted in May 2019 and just last week pledged
guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer.
He is now facing up to 10 years imprisonment along with a fine of
up to $ 250,000.

The sentencing could have been lesser if he had pleaded guilty
early and avoided a full-blown trial.

Chief United States District Judge Peter J. Phipps has scheduled
Tinley’s sentencing for November 8, 2019.

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