CIO NIGHTMARE

Fannie Mae Logic Bomb Would Have Caused Weeklong Shutdown

By Kevin Poulsen January 29, 2009 | 1:41:19 PMCategories: Threats  

A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.

Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, wasindicted (.pdf) Tuesday in federal court in Maryland on a single count of computer sabotage for allegedly writing and planting the malicious code on Oct. 24, the day he was fired from his job. The malware had been set to detonate at 9:00 a.m. on Jan. 31,

Had it not been found, the FBI says the code would have executed a series of other scripts designed to block the com

pany's monitoring system, disable access to the server on which it was running, then systematically wipe out all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, overwriting all their data with zeroes.

"This would also destroy the backup software of the servers making the restoration of data more difficult because new operating systems would have to be installed on all servers before any restoration could begin," wrote Nye.

As a final measure, the logic bomb would have powered off the servers.

SOURCE:Permalink 

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