ComputerWorld reports that an Indian national Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, in an outsourced contract job as a Unix engineer is accused of planting malicious code on his employer’s network. Makwana was employed by the Federal National Mortgage Association, better known as Fannie Mae. He has been accused of planting malicious code on the corporation’s network that was to “destroy and alter” all the data on the company’s servers on 01-31-09, court documents show.
Makwana, 35, was indicted on 01-27-2009 by a federal court on a single charge of computer intrusion, according to documents released yesterday. Reports are unclear about the attacker’s employer or his employment status. According to the AP, Makwana has lived in the United States since at least 2001.
According to the complaint sworn by FBI Special Agent Jessica Nye, Makwana was let go from his outsourced contract position at Fannie Mae’s Urbana, Md., datacenter on Oct. 24, 2008. He was fired after he had “erroneously created a computer script that changed the settings on the Unix servers without the proper authority of his supervisor,” Makwana had created that settings-changing script on Oct. 10 or Oct. 11, as much as two weeks before he was fired, Nye said.
Within 90 minutes of being told he was terminated on Oct. 24, and several hours before his access to the Fannie Mae network was disabled later that evening, Makwana embedded a malicious script in a legitimate script that ran on Fannie Mae’s network every morning, Nye said in her affidavit.
The logic bomb would have “caused millions of dollars in damage and reduced if not shutdown [sic] operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week” if it had not been found before Saturday’s trigger date, the complaint said. “this script would power off all servers, disabling the ability to remotely turn on a server,” said the government’s complaint. “Subsequently, the only way to turn the servers back on was physically getting to a data center.”
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I agree with Dvorak’s piece on MarketWatch which asks the rhetorical question, why was Makwana working at Fannie Mae in the first place? Are you telling me no American citizen could have done his job?
It has long been believed that in most cases H-1B visas in technology have been exploited by companies such as Fannie Mae only because programmers coming from India work cheaper. Over the years, companies like Fannie Mae have been begging for more and more H-1B visas to outsource more jobs.. That means more people working cheaper than the going rate. You get what you pay for.
This episode also is further evidence that Fannie Mae is still a poorly run company. Is it really so hard to turn off someone’s network access when you take their ID card?. A good place to start is that when a person is meeting with their boss and HR, to be terminated, their access to all systems is to be suspended. There is no reason to allow access to remote systems. In this case, based on the papers filed, Just more of my tax dollars at waste work.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.