LOGIC BOMB - Code surreptitiously inserted into an application or operating system that causes destructive or security compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. (For example, a logic bomb may be set to execute at a certain date or time.)
Sabotage Using Logic Bombs
Employee sabotage can take many forms. For example, employees can take documents with them when they leave to work for a competitor.
More harmful examples can involve employee destruction of files, causing enormous harm to the employer. This case involves both kinds of sabotage committed by an employee of Bob's Space Racers, the manufacturer of the classic arcade game, Whac-A-Mole. In case you don't know, Whac-a-Mole is the classic arcade and carnival game where you use a rubber mallet to smack plastic moles on the head as they pop out of different holes.
In 1980, a guy named Marvin Wimberly Junior of Orlando, Florida started working there as a game programmer. He was 31 years old at the time. After 30 years with the company, he started noticing they were really cutting his work so he sabotaged the famous Whac-A-Mole games with a logic bomb that "broke" the machines after a pre-determined number of times that it was turned on and off, in this case after exactly 511 starts.
Once the virus hit, the computers were inoperable--unless, that is, Wimberly was sent to perform maintenance. Seven months after the viruses began, Wimberly raised his programming price from $60 to $150 per computer chip. He later told a coworker that he'd programmed another game to fail after 48 or 49 power cycles because he hadn't been paid.
The idea was that each time these broke, Wimberly would be called in for a repair. Of course, with each "repair," he'd install another logic bomb. Since he was the only one who knew the real "problem," he figured it was a form of job security. His company couldn't let him go, because no one else could fix the problem.
But the company caught on, and eventually the police were called in. After an investigation, Marvin was arrested and charged with the unusual crime of offenses against intellectual property--a felony for which he faced a possible sentence of 15 years in prison.
Write and submit a one to two page response that addresses the following questions.
Wimberly was charged with the unusual crime of offenses against intellectual property- a felony. Do you feel a possible 15 year prison sentence would have been an appropriate sentence or too harsh for a case such as this? Why?
Consider that most hackers are young; many are minors. Should this fact shape how the criminal law approaches the crime of planting logic bombs?
To what extent is "overcriminalization" a problem for the criminal justice system? Have Congress and the state legislatures subjected too many offenses to criminal sanctions? What, if any, currently criminalized conduct do you believe should be decriminalized and why?