Contractor Convicted of Planting Fannie Mae Malware Bomb

A computer contractor hired by Fannie Mae to perform work on their network was convicted in court of rigging the corporate server farm to delete all of its data upon his termination from the contract.

From Graham Clueley’s blog at Sophos here:

A computer programmer has been convicted after planting a malicious script, designed to destroy data from the servers of Fannie Mae, a US financial giant.

36-year-old Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana worked for three years as a software engineer contractor at Fannie Mae’s offices in Urbana, Maryland, and had access to all of the company’s almost 5000 servers.

Fannie Mae terminated Makwana’s employment at their 247,000 square foot Urbana Technology Center on October 24th, 2008, and within days found malicious code had been embedded on their systems designed to wipe out all data on their network at 9:00am on January 31st, 2009.

According to prosecutors, anyone trying to log in to the network on January 31st would have received a message saying “Server Graveyard”.

Computer logs and analysis of Makwana’s laptop revealed that he was the instigator of the malware.

With the housing crisis in full swing Fannie Mae could have been sidelined as long as a week to get their network back in shape. Its a good thing they were able to detect the sabotage in time.