Hell hath no fury like a programmer scorned?
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, was indicted (.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, but was instead discovered by another engineer five days after it was planted, according to court records.[...]
On the afternoon of Oct. 24, he was told he was being fired because of a scripting error he’d made earlier in the month, but he was allowed to work through the end of the day, according to an FBI affidavit (.pdf) in the case. “Despite Makwana’s termination, Makwana’s computer access was not immediately terminated,” wrote FBI agent Jessica Nye.
Five days later, another Unix engineer at the data center discovered the malicious code hidden inside a legitimate script that ran automatically every morning at 9:00 a.m. 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.[...]
As a final measure, the logic bomb would have powered off the servers.
Some have said in comments on there that (assuming it was really him — innocent until proven guilty an’ all that) delaying the trigger was a mistake, but I think it was clever. If it’d had a chance to go off then it wouldn’t have been so obvious what the motive behind it was by then.
BTW: I find it hard to believe that, with how easy it was to stick such a devestating code in & the huge oversight error (who the hell tells someone they’re fired and then leaves ‘em alone at their desk the rest of the day?), the lower range of recovery time was only a week. Ideally, of course, the shutdown would’ve been permanent…
