UNIX programmer Fannie Mae planted for 41 months for the installation of a logical bomb
Programmer R. Makvana (Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, a citizen of India) was sentenced last week to 41 months in prison for installing a "logical bomb" on computer servers Fannie Mae. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as a contract administrator in a data center in Maryland. As a UNIX programmer, he served a network of approximately 5,000 company servers, and in October 2008 he was fired.
The lead engineer Fannie Mae later discovered malicious code in one of the standard programs, which was supposed to work on January 31, 2009 and destroy all information on all the company's servers, including data on finance, securities, mortgage loans. McWanna had root access to all major systems, including backups.
The malicious code was discovered, as they say, by accident : the aforementioned specialist decided to scroll to the end a working script and found at the end a few new lines.
It should be noted that Fannie Mae - the largest mortgage agency, it finances more than 20% of mortgage loans in the United States. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened to the market, the stock exchange and the mortgage payments of millions of citizens if the McWanna script had worked.
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It was possible to collect evidence about the involvement of the programmer in this case from his laptop and analyzing the logs on the servers. Given the potential damage, his sentence looks extremely mild.
If you think about it, the “stability of the global economy” (umputun) is in the hands of a small number of relatively low-paid techies. They are not millionaires, they drink strong alcohol and can come to work without sleep.
A little more details about McWana's "logical bomb" here . According to the FBI, if McWann even destroyed the backups, the recovery of information would still be possible. It would take a week during which the rest of Fannie Mae’s activities could be completely stopped.
The lead engineer Fannie Mae later discovered malicious code in one of the standard programs, which was supposed to work on January 31, 2009 and destroy all information on all the company's servers, including data on finance, securities, mortgage loans. McWanna had root access to all major systems, including backups.
The malicious code was discovered, as they say, by accident : the aforementioned specialist decided to scroll to the end a working script and found at the end a few new lines.
It should be noted that Fannie Mae - the largest mortgage agency, it finances more than 20% of mortgage loans in the United States. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened to the market, the stock exchange and the mortgage payments of millions of citizens if the McWanna script had worked.
')
It was possible to collect evidence about the involvement of the programmer in this case from his laptop and analyzing the logs on the servers. Given the potential damage, his sentence looks extremely mild.
If you think about it, the “stability of the global economy” (umputun) is in the hands of a small number of relatively low-paid techies. They are not millionaires, they drink strong alcohol and can come to work without sleep.
A little more details about McWana's "logical bomb" here . According to the FBI, if McWann even destroyed the backups, the recovery of information would still be possible. It would take a week during which the rest of Fannie Mae’s activities could be completely stopped.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/111008/
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