Update: Fannie Mae engineer indicted for planting server bomb

A former Unix engineer for the Federal National Mortgage Association, better known as Fannie Mae, has been accused of planting malicious code on the corporation's network that was to "destroy and alter" all of the data on the company's servers this Saturday, court documents show.

Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, 35, was indicted Tuesday by a federal court on a single charge of computer intrusion, according to documents released Wednesday.

[ Last year, an admin for the city of San Francisco went rogue, changing root passwords and locking other IT workers out of the system. ]

Makwana was let go from his contract position at Fannie Mae's Urbana, Md., data center on Oct. 24, 2008, after he had "erroneously created a computer script that changed the settings on the Unix servers without the proper authority of his supervisor," read a complaint sworn by FBI Special Agent Jessica Nye earlier this month. Makwana had created that settings-changing script on Oct. 10 or Oct. 11, as much as two weeks before he was fired, Nye said.

Although Nye's affidavit said Makwana was employed by OmniTech Systems, the company late Thursday disputed that, saying Makwana had not been in their employ at any time, but was instead a "pass-through" contractor paid by another company. On Friday, FBI spokesman Rich Wolf confirmed OmniTech's claim. "They were an innocent party here," said Wolf.

Makwana was let go from his contract position at Fannie Mae's Urbana, Md., datacenter on Oct. 24, 2008, after he had "erroneously created a computer script that changed the settings on the Unix servers without the proper authority of his supervisor," read a complaint sworn by FBI Special Agent Jessica Nye earlier this month. Makwana had created that settings-changing script on Oct. 10 or Oct. 11, Nye said, as much as two weeks before he was fired.

Within 90 minutes of being told he was terminated on Oct. 24, and several hours before his access to the Fannie Mae network was disabled later that evening, Makwana embedded a malicious script in a legitimate script that ran on Fannie Mae's network every morning, Nye said in her affidavit.

The malicious script was set to trigger Jan. 31 -- this Saturday -- but was discovered by another Fannie Mae engineer just five days after Makwana was fired. According to the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Makwana tried to hide the malicious script by inserting a page of blank lines at the bottom of the legitimate script.

"It was only by chance that [the Fannie Mae engineer] scrolled down to the bottom of the legitimate script to discover the malicious script," the complaint read.

If the malicious script had gone undiscovered, it would have disabled monitoring alerts and all log-ins, deleted the root passwords to the approximately 4,000 servers that Fannie Mae operates, then erased all data and backup data on those servers by overwriting with zeros.