Man Indicted for Trying to Set Off ‘Logic Bomb’

The 50-year old employee Yung-Hsun Lin is facing charges of attempting to cause damage to over 70 servers in his company systems after introducing a vicious 'logic bomb' code. The man was expecting to be laid off from his work as an IT systems administrator. The records that could have been wiped out include those relied on by pharmacists to check whether there are unsafe combinations in drugs given to an individual.

Yung-Hsun Lin had been with the firm Medco Health Solutions of Franklin Lakes, N.J., for seven years. He was dismissed in 2005 in the course of the inquiry that eventually resulted in his detention at his residence in Montville on Tuesday. Authorities think that if the logic-bomb had been activated, it would've erased important patient information. Prosecutors say that despite not being laid off, Yung-Hsun Lin did not withdraw the code from the system and tried to set that malicious code in operation.

The servers held a number of applications and databases that took care of invoices, rebates, new medicinal orders, insurance coverage, and clinical diagnoses of patients.
One database singled out for scrutiny in the indictment, called the Drug Utilization Review, was designed to let pharmacists know the current regimen of drugs for patients so that it could be decided whether consuming separate medicines at the same time was harmless.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Erez Lieberman, who is one of those handling the case, believes that the consequences of the execution of the logic bomb could have been very serious. Patients would have been the ones to be the most affected. The logic bomb could have caused not just financial damage but also harm to databases, something the accused was well aware of. His crime is therefore a grave one.

US Attorney Christopher Christie says that the possible injury to the company and patients cannot be played down. A malicious code such as this could have stopped all the company's operations and resulted in millions of dollars worth of damage.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/26/2006