Computer saboteur sentenced to federal prison

Network World - A former systems administrator was sentenced today to 41 months in federal jail and ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution for a 1996 attack on his former employer's computer network.

Tim Lloyd, 39, of Wilmington, Del., must surrender to the U.S. federal court May 6. Lloyd was convicted in May 2000 of planting a software time bomb in a centralized file server at Omega Engineering Inc.'s Bridgeport, N.J., manufacturing plant. On July 31, 1996, the malicious software code destroyed the programs that ran the company's manufacturing machines, costing Omega more than $10 million in losses and $2 million in reprogramming costs and eventually leading to 80 layoffs.

Lloyd, who had worked at Omega for 11 years and became "a trusted member of the family" there, had actually built the computer network that he would later destroy. Because of the attack, Stamford, Conn.-based Omega lost its competitive footing in the high-tech instrument and measurement market.

"We will never recover," plant manager Jim Ferguson testified in court.

Lloyd's lawyer, Ed Crisonino, said he will appeal the sentence, which also carries with it a three-year probationary period. Under federal computer sabotage laws, Lloyd could have received up to five years in jail.

William H. Walls, the judge who presided over the case, told Lloyd, "What you did not only affected the company but the people who worked there. We need to deter others in this increasingly computerized world and economy."

"This was a devious and calculated act," said prosecutor V. Grady O'Malley. "It had a catastrophic effect on the company. The government must send a message to systems managers and people in trust that there will be a day of reckoning."

The Lloyd case was the first federal criminal prosecution of computer sabotage (see story). Industry observers had hailed the conviction as a precedent-setting victory, proving that the government is capable of tracking down and prosecuting computer crime.

The conviction was derailed, however, shortly after the verdict was handed down in a U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., when Walls set aside the decision (see story). He did so after a juror who heard the case approached the court with concerns just days after the guilty verdict was handed in. The juror told the judge she was unsure whether a piece of information she heard on the TV news regarding the Love Bug had been factored into her verdict, according to O'Malley.

However, in October 2001, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reinstated the guilty verdict. In its