Siemens Contractor Pleads Guilty to Planting 'Logic Bomb' in Spreadsheets
Jul 24, 2019
A former Siemens contractor has pledged guilty in federal court Friday to secretly planting code in automated spreadsheets he had created for the company over a decade ago that deliberately crashes the program every few years. 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 expire
