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Fannie Mae Worker Indicted For Malicious Script
dfdashh writes "A former Fannie Mae contractor has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore, MD for computer intrusion. He attempted to propagate a malicious script throughout the company's 4,000 servers. The DC Examiner has details of the incident: 'Had this malicious script executed, [Fannie Mae] engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week. ... The virus was set to execute at 9 a.m. Jan. 31, first disabling Fannie Mae's computer monitoring system and then cutting all access to the company's 4,000 servers, Nye wrote. Anyone trying to log in would receive a message saying "Server Graveyard." From there, the virus would wipe out all Fannie Mae data, replacing it with zeros, Nye wrote. Finally, the virus would shut down the servers.'"
Obviously virus is what the idiot who wrote the article is calling it (and possibly a term used in whatever he has been charged with), but since he had root access to all the servers it wouldn't really be a virus. Just a script installed on them, probably run via plain old cron.
When you terminate a contractor or employee it is wise to also terminate their access to your servers...
#!/bin/sh /dev/[sh]d* /dev/zero >"$i" &
for i in
do
cat
done
is not exactly a great piece of programming (and the above is obviously untested, and since he was a unix admin he would actually know what the drive device names are in the presence of wierdo RAID setups...)
I'm guessing you don't really understand what Fannie Mae does if you think the folk taken down a peg would be the banks.
Fannie Mae purchased mortgages from banks to ensure the banks always had money on hand to make loans. They sold these mortgages as securities, guarantying the purchaser the money (paying it themselves if the mortgagee defaults).
Them loosing their records would simply mean that suddenly the banks would run out of 'liquid assets' to make loans with. Who do you think that would hurt: The average joe or the banks?
Let me give you a clue, it wouldn't be the banks. They'd just hold onto the mortgages they have and start foreclosing aggressively to come up with the assets they need.
Fannie Mae was not the problem there, they only purchased "conforming" mortgages which matched their definition of a 'non-risky' loan.
The problem was from the fact that the banks started moving from relying on Fannie Mae and started making "non-conforming" mortgages and selling them to other privately held companies. Once these mortgages started defaulting and housing prices started falling, even the "conforming" mortgages started having problems and the house of cards fell.
Fannie Mae is a good scapegoat for people who want to pin this whole situation on one group, but that's all they really are, a scapegoat. They had their own problems (notably shady dealing in the upper echelons) but they weren't the ones who cause or even setup this scenario.
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
Even as a hardcore liberal, that's my main argument in favor of gun ownership, a well-armed populace, with personal liberty and responsibility as our most essential civic virtues. Where guns are prohibited, the only people with guns are criminals... and the government. In Cambodia, the Khmer took the guns first, and then massacred 40% of their population.
I just wish other people looked at history and saw the same cautionary tales. The concept that democratic societies are somehow automagically inoculated against totalitarianism strikes me as hopelessly naive. For example, I'm really creeped out at the growing state-sponsored helplessness of our our brothers and sisters in the UK.
Just more proof that the motheaten left/right paradigm that talking heads are always blathering about hasn't been relevant since the French Revolution. We're all in this together as a society, and if you can't trust your law-abiding neighbors with guns, you need to get to know them better.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Stupid SHOULD hurt. The government and the liberals don't realize this. And yes, I said Liberals ... not Democrats. There were plenty of LIBERAL (see compassionate conservatives) in the Republican Party too.
And by "Stupid" I don't mean lack of intelligence (IQ), I mean DARWIN Award winners types. These are the people who have a brain, should know better, but don't F'in care about what they are doing and expect everyone else to clean up their mess.
Sorry, but STUPID SHOULD HURT! Like when you stick your hand on the stove hurt. Like when you make stupid loans and bundle them into derivatives to leverage the stupidity and then re-bundle those into even more stupid derivatives. IT all works, until it doesn't, then everyone pays for the Ponzi Schemes.
Which is why the stupid Bailouts to the same people that caused this mess is just stupidity on top of stupidity. We are now leveraging STUPID to try to stop the "HURT".
And nobody is willing to tell it like it is. STUPID!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.