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.'"

Comments

Re:Disappointing...

[anagama]

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?

It seems to me that banks making loans over the last four years IS THE major problem. Had they not been able to, we wouldn't have had a baseless boom, Angelo Mozillo, a gazillion dollar bailout of the wealthiest individuals, and schemes to assist the most foolish "housing investors" -- all at my expense. I too am rather disappointed the script was found and I don't even have a mortgage. I refused to get caught up in the housing bubble choosing instead to wait for a return to normalcy, which turned out to be a mistake. What I should have done is bought a house way more expensive than I could afford on a negative amortization loan and let the government modify my interest rate and principal balance. I now realize that in America, prudence is punished and stupidity rewarded. So yeah, I'm actually very depressed the script didn't execute.

Re:Disappointing...

[anagama]

So if Fannie Mae had NOT been able to buy the conforming loans, banks making stupid loans would have had less money available to them because they'd have to hold the conforming loans, and as a result, those banks would have made fewer stupid loans. Sounds to me like FM was part of the problem. Honestly, I'm pissed. I'd like to see the entire banking industry lined up against the wall, because all it has amounted to recently is a Federally sanctioned highway robbery program targeted against people who live within their means and act responsibly.