An employee of a company regularly caused the company’s system to crash to make money. However, when he went on vacation, it was discovered that he was behind the problems. He has since been convicted but got off lightly.
In 2014, there were unusual crashes in the custom automated spreadsheets in a Siemens building in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. At that time, no one suspected that an overly eager employee was behind it.
Two years later, however, the “job creation measure” was uncovered and the former employee was punished. This is reported by colleagues from Industrialcybersecuritypulse.com.
The employee was caught because he went on vacation and shared his password with colleagues
Who was behind the problems? An employee was hired by the company over a period of 10 years to develop or continue numerous projects.
At some point during his employment, he was tasked with creating a spreadsheet that “would update the contents of the file based on current orders stored in other, remote documents, thereby allowing the company to automate inventory and order management.”
However, the developer came up with the clever idea to introduce a bug into this software and set it up so that the systems would crash every few months. In technical terms, this is also known as a logic bomb, which responds to certain actions and causes a fault.
Why did the employee do this? The employee probably thought that he could permanently secure fresh orders with this action: because the company would pay him every time for the repair when the error occurred. And this actually worked quite well for several years.
How was he caught? For two years this went well, but then the employee took vacation. This was fortunate for the company because he left his colleagues his password. Since the employee had not hidden his mistake well, he was quickly found and could be reported.
The punishment for the wrongdoer, however, was surprisingly mild:
- Six months in prison.
- Two years of supervised release.
- A fine of $7,500.
More on strange employees: There are also other individuals who get caught due to foolish mistakes while harming their company. In this case, however, it is about 230,000 euros that the employee is said to have stolen. You can read the entire story directly on MeinMMO:
