Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
the only thing that matters to me... will it erase my mortgage??!??!
We've gotta wipe the system, man. Give everyone a blank slate!
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com
Either a laughing skull and bones or an animated version of him as a bobblehead that pisses off Samuel L. Jackson with his hacker crap?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Look like he was flying through a cyberspace version of his city while he was doing it???
...turned Fannie Mae into a financial failure.
Considering that Fannie Mae has been losing billions every week, the idea of only losing a few million for a week sounds like a great idea.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise
Technically, all of the data in a computer is really just a bunch of ones and zeros, so assuming a fairly even mix of those two possibilities, writing over everything with zeros would only change half of their data.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
This is like if someone mixed the movies Office Space and Fight Club together!
Former FNMA employee here- I left a couple years ago.
1- The vast majority of their servers run Solaris- this wasn't some sort of cross-platform attack.
2- They have an infrastructure that allows a single admin server to execute commands on the entire farm simultaneously.
Suddenly being able to wipe out everything doesn't sound too difficult does it? From what I heard from friends- it was just a couple lines of shell, and it was discovered because there was a typo, and script to failed. Not a virus by any stretch.
Oh- and of course they have backups, but imagine restoring 2500+ servers from tape... Thats probably where the week of downtime came from, and it sounds accurate to me.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
From there, the virus would wipe out all Fannie Mae data, replacing it with zeros
Wouldn't zero be an improvement over negative whatever?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
While reading through the article, and some of the talkback, I stumbled across this document which contains results of the actual investigation. It has lots of actual details, and is worth a read. (meanwhile, the news articles are a little too dumbed-down to be of any real value or interest).