Fannie Mae: 1 – Pissed off ex-employee: 0

What employee hasn’t thought about getting back at the company that has just fired them? Probably a lot but one fella working for the firm OmniTech was contracted out to Fanny Mae definitely intended on doing some serious damage when he was fired for writing a bad script. Even though he was fired he was allowed to work through to the end of the day apparently which gave him enough time to put his nefarious plan into action.

According to the FBI affidavit (pdf) even though he was fired Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, still had access to his computer access. Using that access Makwana wrote a logic bomb and planted it at the tail end of a legitimate script that was run every day on the Fanny Mae servers. Luckily for Fanny Mae though that another engineer discovered the malicious code because if it had been run it would have excuted a series of other scripts that would have brought down all 4,000 servers

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

The trigger code was hidden at the end of the legitimate program, separated by a page of blank lines. Logs showed that Makwana had logged onto the server on which the logic bomb was created in his final hours on the job.

Source: Threat Level