Unix admin plants logic bomb

September 2007

Unix admin pleads guilty to planting logic bomb at Medco Health. On Wednesday a former Unix system administrator at Medco Health Solutions Inc.’s Fair Lawn, N.J. office pleaded guilty in federal court to attempting to sabotage critical data -- including individual prescription drug data -- on more than 70 servers. The man, 51, is scheduled to be sentenced on January 8, and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of $250,000. He was one of several systems administrators at Medco who feared they would get laid off when their company was being spun off from drug-maker Merck & Co. in 2003, according to a statement released by federal law enforcement authorities. Apparently angered by the prospect of losing his job, he created a “logic bomb” by modifying existing computer code and inserting new code into Medco's servers. The bomb was originally set to go off on April 23, 2004, the man’s birthday. When it failed to deploy because of a programming error, he reset the logic bomb to deploy on April 23, 2005, despite the fact that he had not been laid off as feared. The bomb was discovered and neutralized in early January 2005, after it was discovered by a Medco computer systems administrator investigating a system error. Had it gone off as scheduled, the malicious code would have wiped out data stored on 70 servers, including one critical server that maintained patient-specific drug interaction information that pharmacists use to determine whether conflicts exist among an individual's prescribed drugs. Also affected would have been information on clinical analyses, rebate applications, billing, new prescription call-ins from doctors, coverage determination applications and employee payroll data.