Fannie Mae Worker Indicted For Malicious Script 325
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.'"
Re:The First Rule of Fight Club (Score:1, Informative)
Clearly he was just trying to announce NESARA [nesara.us].
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Not in the financial business.
Everything needs to be approved, certified and someone has to get a kickback. Only the former two are official, the third is most likely the reason for the first two because I, at least, couldn't find any other sensible explanation, but that's just how it is. To be allowed in some important network, this can be some auditing standard or information exchange, you almost certainly have to use one of the "approved" systems.
So it's quite likely, actually, that you find a monoculture of servers in financial companies. And guess what kind of monoculture it will be?
Re:erase my mortgage (Score:5, Informative)
There would be records proving you own the home.
When you take out a mortgage, the deed is still in your name. That's one of the main reasons foreclosure is actually kind of a pain in the ass for banks. They have to get the house transferred to their ownership before they can sell it.
The deed is on paper in a filing cabinet in some county office (It's also stored electronically by the county). You should also have received a copy of it when you signed the flurry of paperwork when you bought the house.
Re:Disappointing... (Score:2, Informative)
I know the damage would not have been , permanent, perfect or complete (That's what backups are for... right?)
Big companies only report successes. They report failures if its too big to hide.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:So what they're saying... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, no, you still won't own your house (Score:5, Informative)
When the deed was recorded at the local records office, the fact that the bank has a lien on it is recorded along with it. The only way to clear that lien is to get the lienholder to have a letter saying so attached to your deed, or you have to have a court do it.
SirWired
Re:Disappointing... (Score:4, Informative)
The Formal Criminal Complaint (Score:5, Informative)
While reading through the article, and some of the talkback, I stumbled across this document [zdnet.com] 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).