Fannie Mae IT contractor indicted for planting malware; Mortgage giant didn’t revoke server privileges

ZD Net reports:

A former Fannie Mae IT contractor has been indicted for planting a virus that would have nuked the mortgage agency’s computers, caused millions of dollars in damages and even shut down operations. How’d this happen? The contractor was terminated, but his server privileges were not.

Rajendrasinh Makwana was indicted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Maryland (press reports, complaint and indictment PDFs). From early 2006 to Oct. 24, Makwana was a contractor for Fannie Mae. According to the indictment, Makwana allegedly targeted Fannie Mae’s network after he was terminated. The goal was to “cause damage to Fannie Mae’s computer network by entering malicious code that was intended to execute on January 31, 2009.” And given Fannie Mae–along with Freddie Mac–was nationalized in an effort to stabilize the mortgate market Makwana could caused a good bit of havoc.

The struggles of national socialism.