The story began back in 2003, when Medco Health Solutions became part of Merck & Co. Planned layoffs were bound to happen, so Lin came up with a revenge plan just in case he would get fired. He created a malicious code in October 3 and set it to automatically deploy on his next birthday, April 23, 2004.
The code was designed to wipe clean all data from 70 company servers. Fortunately, a coding error prevented the disaster in the following year. Lin, who was still with the company at that time, reprogrammed the code in September 2004 and set it to go off on April 23, 2005.
The malicious code was discovered in January during the investigation of a system error and soon pulled out of the system. Lin was later arrested following an FBI investigation.