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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...)
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.
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.
In Cambodia, the Khmer took the guns first, and then massacred 40% of their population.
Took the guns... from whom? And how? Did an elected body pass gun control legislation with the support of the populace, and then turn around and engage in wholesale massacre? Somehow I missed that part of the story.
What's to keep the government from "taking the guns" from a well-armed populace? The same populace? What if the government has bigger guns? They always will, because they have bigger budgets. Your well-armed populace better have fixed anti-aircraft emplacements if someone ever really launches a successful attempt at a military dictatorship in the US.
So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe. Which leaves the question, just what *can* it accomplish? There will always be people within the population who are not armed, whether they are unwilling or unable to become so. Should they have their liberty and health threatened by the "well-armed populace?"
Is there a role for police in your world? Wouldn't any police force that could effectively protect the rights of individuals necessarily require the ability to exert superior force?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?