Former employee accused of writing virus to target Whac-a-Mole machines

Whac-A-Mole seems like it could be endless fun.

Moles pop out of five holes in the arcade game and a soft mallet is used to force them back into the holes to score points.

Children and adults alike could whack the moles for hours at a time.

Or at least they could until a worker programmed a virus into the machines to make them shut down after a pre-determined number of plays, Holly Hill police said.

Now they have arrested that man, Marvin Walter Wimberly Jr., 61, of Orlando, who faces a charge of offenses against intellectual property.

It was all a scheme by Wimberly to insure job security, according to an arrest affidavit.

Bob's Space Racers, an amusement game manufacturer, was established in 1970 and created Whac-A-Mole, police said.

Wimberly, who was treated as an independent contractor, began working there in the 1980, according to the arrest report. His job was to write and maintain computer programs that operated the company's games.

Company officials told police Wimberly received a fee for creating and maintaining the programs and that when the volume of work declined in 2002, an hourly consulting fee was added to his compensation.

In 2008, company officials began encouraging Wimberly to become a full-time, salaried employee and set a deadline of March 31, 2009, to reach an agreement, according to the report. His response was to increase the maintenance fee he was charging the company by 250 percent just before the deadline, police said.

Police believe Wimberly began writing the virus into the computer codes in August 2008 and sold the company 443 computer modules with the infected code for a total of more than $51,000. Once the modules shutdown, they were useless, police said, and total loss to the company was more than $100,000.

A year ago, Wimberly supplied the company with modules which contained an even more complex virus, according to the arrest report.

Company officials believe Wimberly did it to profit from selling the modules to the company and charging the maintenance fee and that he intended to start a company that would sell working modules to customers of Bob's Space Racers who were having issues with the modules that were infected with the virus, the report said.

At one point Wimberly admitted to other workers that he programmed a virus into a new Bongo game to intentionally case it to fail, the report said.

from: Orlando Sentinel via Gizmodo