Un informático que trabajaba para la empresa Siemens programaba errores en el código de la aplicación sobre la que trabajaba para que le contrataran para arreglarlos.
David Tinley, un informático de 62 years, programó errores de código en las hojas de cálculo de la aplicación en la que trabajaba para que, al cabo de un tiempo, ésta diera fallos. La compañía para la que trabajaba, Siemens, desconocía el origen de estos errores y le llamaba para solucionarlos.
Siemens contrató a Tinley para crear hojas de cálculo automatizadas para gestionar peticiones de clientes. En el proceso de creación de estas hojas de cálculo, el informático escondió unas “bombas lógicas”, I mean, malicious code that would run after a certain amount of time. These “bombs” caused the program to display errors and change the size of the tabs.
When these errors occurred on any of the computers with these spreadsheets, the company went to Tinley to fix them. But what he really did was modify a date counter in the code so that, later, the application would fail again and they would hire him again.
David worked for Siemens from 2000, but he started programming the errors from 2014. The errors were discovered in 2016.
When he was taken to trial, Tinley claimed that he did not make money from them, which included those errors to protect the proprietary code that he had created for the company. Siemens countered those claims by showing that it paid 42.000 dollars to pay other employees for discovering the error.
The federal court sentenced Tinley to serve half a year in prison and pay compensation of
7.500 dollars for causing damages to the corporation.