Fannie Mae worker found guilty of planting malware timebomb

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…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.