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.'"
erase my mortgage (Score:5, Funny)
Re:erase my mortgage (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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So if someone say nuked the Fannie Mae servers then millions of people would get free homes?
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I think they would go back to the paper copies...but first the backups. Really data corruption/erasure is best if you can do the corruption before the backup cycle and not have it noticed until afterwards... but even then its just a matter of using older backups.
Barring that, I imagine they would go back to the paper docs. Of course, that wouldn't have payment history, so they would probably have to just assume that all the loans were current unless they could find evidence they were otherwise, and of cours
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
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Don't you think the forgery would come to light when the bank started a foreclosure on you for not paying your mortgage?
It's not like they'd just say, "Huh, coulda sworn this guy owed us money, must've been mistaken," and walk away...
Re:Well, no, you still won't own your house (Score:5, Interesting)
You have no idea how right you are:
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/02/2008-12-02_it_took_90_minutes_for_daily_news_to_ste.html [nydailynews.com]
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Ever hear of 'backups'? Even if Iron Mountain lost half the tapes on the way back to Fannie Mae (again)... there are digital records of your mortgage somewhere.
Surely you have copies of your payments, insurance, property taxes, etc to prove you don't owe the full amount listed on the closing contract, yes?
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Re:erase my mortgage (Score:5, Funny)
You know, we slashdotters, as natural problem-solvers, should get together and work on a program to do that. It's a pretty pie-in-the-sky idea, though. Hey, that gives me an idea. We should call it "Pie-in-the-Sky."
No, sounds too hokey. Need something more computer-sounding. How about "Skynet"?
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Re:erase my mortgage (Score:5, Funny)
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Hence the need for a well-armed civil society. (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true. It amazes me that middle class anarchists believe that if the current society is obliterated it will be a net gain for them because a more equitable society will replace it. Historically you're much more likely to end up with a some sort of Pol Pot style nightmare.
Even as a hardcore liberal, that's my main argument in favor of gun ownership, a well-armed populace, with personal liberty and responsibility as our most essential civic virtues. Where guns are prohibited, the only people with guns ar
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Sadly I used my last mod points about 5 minutes ago on another story.
Liberal or conservative, I don't tend to lose respect for people on legitimate intellectual differences, but gun control is one of those that has so much historical backing that it should be self-evident. It is not an intellectual difference of opinion, it is the difference between ignorance and being informed and able to think critically about history. There are cons to having open access to firearms in a society, but those cons cannot ev
Re:Hence the need for a well-armed civil society. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe.
Absolutely, 100% WRONG. See Iraq, where a group of well-armed citizens armed with only small arms and improvised explosives made life absolutely for the most powerful military on the planet. This is after repeated calls for the Iraqis to turn in their guns, snitch on their neighbors for reward, etc.
BTW, legal gun owners AREN'T the ones "threatening the liberty and health" of those without guns -- that's what violent criminals do who simp
It won't erase your mortgage... but that's okay. (Score:2)
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Foreclosed upon with extreme prejudice.
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Considering Fannie and Freddie's part in the mortguage/financial meltdown currently in session. Maybe wiping it out for a spell wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing?
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Considering Fannie and Freddie's part in the mortguage/financial meltdown currently in session. Maybe wiping it out for a spell wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Truing to prove your sig? :-)
Many lenders only offer mortgages because they know there is an organization like Fannie Mae who will or at least could buy their mortgages. That would pretty much end mortgage lending in the US, or at least make it much, much more expensive. The democrats would never let this happen, since it would disproportionately affect their voting base.
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You know what would happen if mortgage lending ended? Houses would lower in price to a level affordable without 30 year financing.
No, actually, it wouldn't...
What would happen is that the real estate market would pretty much freeze. You could buy a house if you had one to sell; otherwise, you'd rent. If you inherited a house from someone else, you might sell it (to someone who could pay for it out-of-pocket), and then buy another... but the ability to buy and sell houses would be limited to those who already owned one to sell for the money, and/or had cash in hand.
Granted, this would dramatically lower prices, but not to the point w
The First Rule of Fight Club (Score:5, Funny)
but would it have had graphics? (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:but would it have had graphics? (Score:4, Funny)
Disappointing... (Score:3, Interesting)
The "Fight Club" guy in me would like to have seen that particular bomb go off. I know the damage would not have been , permanent, perfect or complete (That's what backups are for... right?) but still. Taking those financial giants down a peg might have tickled me. (It damn sure wouldn't have taught anyone any moral lessons or anything.
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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:Disappointing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing you don't really understand what Fannie Mae does if you think the folk taken down a peg would be the banks.
Fannie Mae purchased mortgages from banks to ensure the banks always had money on hand to make loans. They sold these mortgages as securities, guarantying the purchaser the money (paying it themselves if the mortgagee defaults).
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?
Let me give you a clue, it wouldn't be the banks. They'd just hold onto the mortgages they have and start foreclosing aggressively to come up with the assets they need.
Re:Disappointing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Disappointing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The banks would have just sold those loans to someone other than FM instead. Preventing FM from buying loans doesn't solve anything.
If anything, it makes it worse... Because then the banks feel no need to 'conform' to FM's standards and many more loans would have been stupid.
Re:Disappointing... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Disappointing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't go absolving Fannie Mae, their management was just as evil as anyone else's. Let's not forget their little, "oops we need to restate our income by a few billion dollars" fiasco. There were plenty of people in the FNMA Market Room who were playing fast and loose with mortgage backed securities.
Re:Disappointing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Disappointing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jesus FUCKING Christ on a stick.
Would you honestly rather your kids live through another Great Depression (with the knowledge that neither of the "Great"s were solved by anything other wars so massive that they slaughtered good percents of the working base, thus removing the issue of unemployment) or with a devalued dollar and stable nation?
STUPID is cutting your nose off just to spite your face, which is exactly the plan of action you are pushing for.
STUPID is letting the whole thing go down the tubes and fucking everyone over just to hold on to your sense of pride over the fact that a few scam artists might get away with their scam. Not, mind you, have any of them actually made it to the clear yet.
STUPID is waving the banner for your children while setting them up for a life of misery.
And frankly, as STUPID as I consider your plan of action, since my life is also impacted by your STUPID, I'm not interested in hearing anymore. Take a tranquilizer or something for your stiff neck and let it go.
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Banks don't make money (really, not much) on money sitting in their vaults. For them to make money, they have to invest it. Banks invest money by making loans. Some of those loans are home mortgages, some aren't.
Loans come with the expectation that they will be repaid.
In a 'nicer' time, banks might look at a person's situation before foreclosing after the first missed payment. But in lean times, missing a payment means distrupting the bank's own flow of money. It's better, in their head, to foreclose, sell
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No, the lesson is don't hire an idiot to try to bury your mess.
But did it.... (Score:5, Funny)
Really? (Score:2)
A virus that can propagate through an entire enterprise's array of servers, and then wipe out all data?
Most enterprises comprise a heterogeneous mix of servers of differing breeds. Getting a program to run on all of them, and then to gain access to data and transform it all in a single virus would be a great piece of programming, and any enterprise looking to hire an efficient data migration specialist or integration architect should consider hiring...
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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 monocultur
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Why?
Fanne May more than likely uses Server 2003 with MSSQL. and I'm betting all on the same domain with a global user list.
This would not a hard thing to do. 1 afternoon with VB and I can write the same thing. Hacker 101 stuff.
Most financial places have REALLY SHITTY IT security.
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Fannie Mae uses Tandem Nonstops.
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Don't you mean HP Nonstops? Or have they not upgraded their hardware since Tandem went away?
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Yes, I mean HP. I work with a bunch of ex-Tandem types, so they call them 'Tandems'. I picked up that nomenclature.
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.
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Even if the vast majority are Solaris, a previous poster mentioned a fair amount of HP hardware may also be in the mix.
Something we all would do well to recognize is that a shell script can easily be "cross platform", at least regarding all the flavors of *nix including Solaris, HPUX, Linux and BSD.
(although I'd probably use perl to pull in the libraries and speed up development time)
Heck, with only a little bi
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...)
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You obviously underestimate the power of VB script my friend. :-)
"Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwan"? (Score:2)
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Yeah, but his friends call him "Raj".
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Yeah, but his friends call him "Raj".
My gods man, have you never placed a call to tech support, his name is (Tom, Mike, George, or Larry)
My goodness! It might have... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My goodness! It might have... (Score:5, Interesting)
...turned Fannie Mae into a financial failure
... which it never was during the 30 years from 1968 to 2000, roughly when banking deregulation took effect. It may be that such an institution is a bad idea, but you have to consider that financial institutions of all kinds are in desperate condition as well, so you can't use the financial disasters of 2008 as proof that Fannie is any worse an idea than, say, a private investment bank.
The idea that Fannies failure shows that it ought never have been, applied consistently, would argue for nationalizing banks. I, as one who has been a staunch liberal though the long winter of liberal dispute, think nationalization is a terrible idea. This is not because the government is bad and business is good, but because government and business would be indistinguishable, leaving nobody to watch the foxes in the chicken coop.
All in all, I think the widespread calamity in the financial sector more probably indicates that the particular kind of banking deregulation practiced in the post Gramm-Leach-Bliley era has at the very least unintended consequences.
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... which it never was during the 30 years from 1968 to 2000, roughly when banking deregulation took effect. It may be that such an institution is a bad idea, but you have to consider that financial institutions of all kinds are in desperate condition as well, so you can't use the financial disasters of 2008 as proof that Fannie is any worse an idea than, say, a private investment bank.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac served an unusual role. They were a huge source of poorly understood risk. And their special status with government resulted in their securities instruments being considered more sound than they actually were. They helped start the financial disaster. Frankly, due to their exceptional size, I think the economic problems now would be considerably better in their absence. Other banks would have taken their place and made the same bad decisions. But those private banks wouldn't have
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True, but the wise men of wall street were supposed to have their exalted status because they knew how to grade and price risk better than ordinary mortals. If I were a Citibank investor, and Charlie Prince told me to my face that the reason my stock was in the toilet wast that Franklin Raines pulled a two bit Svengali act on him, I'd spit in Prince's eye.
And with respect to Fannie and Freddie's "special status with the government", what, exactly is this special status they enjoy? That they are too big to
It's a deal! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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"Your honor, I didn't want to cause damage, actually, I wanted to help save a little money by only damaging them for a few millions so they cannot blow billions of taxpayer money this week"
I am .... (Score:5, Funny)
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise
Technically (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Technically (Score:5, Funny)
Great defense.
"In fairness, a lot of those were zeros already."
That is why (Score:2)
any hacker worth his/her salt should have changed all the ones to zeros and all the zeros to ones! N00BS!!
Technically yerself, yerself (Score:2)
Damn, copy/paste
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Wrong on all 3.
a) "Bunch" is singular. That is one bunch of bananas.
b) I shouldn't have to explain this, but in said bunch, there are ones, and there are zeros. A single bit is a one or a zero; multiple bits, each of which is either a one or a zero, provide a set of that contains both ones and zeros. (Assuming that there is at least 1 one and 1 zero in a given set. If the set were all ones or all zeros, then it would indeed be correct to call it a set of "ones or zeros.")
c) Spellcheck should provide the ins
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Thanks.
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You are wrong on both counts (as grammar nazis often are).
A) I am aware that "data" was originally the plural of "datum", but its use as a plural is largely antiquated. Its current most common usage is as an uncountable quantity just like "water". It sounds just as weird to say that you have "five data" as to say you have "five waters". You instead have "10GB of data" or "1L of water".
B) Saying that your data is a bunch of ones and zeroes is absolutely correct. "The animals in the zoo are mammals and re
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I think you may be wrong there.
would you say:
a) "all of the data in a computer is crap"
b) "all of the data in a computer are crap"
I know that 'data' is technically a plural, but it's not treated that way by most people.
also - "ones and zeros" is correct. If you were asked "what numbers are there in that hard-drive", you would not answer "ones or zeros"
also, to the other replier - "zeros" and "zeroes" are both correct.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/49/6649.html [bartleby.com]
Interesting Comment in TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it isn't verifiable, but I thought this was interesting:
H1B#36a: "What wasn't reported was that the contractor was fired for writing a script poorly, that caused the failover over of a number of High-Availablitity production servers. His "landmine/timebomb" script was found through his same poor scripting skills. Whatever doping manager that hired that guy should be fired too, along with his director and VP!"
-t.
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Thats sounds like the FNMA I know :-)
Woah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Woah (Score:5, Funny)
The first rule of PC Load Letter is you don't talk about PC Load Letter.
Might have been a good idea... (Score:2)
Maybe it would have gotten rid of them (should have happened when they went bankrupt, like what happens to most companies)...
Slightly sarcastic, but with a point.
obviously came to FNME from a wall street bank (Score:2)
this is their business model over there.
So much for (Score:2)
cinema's next The Devil Wears Prada.
Millions of dollars worth of damage? (Score:2)
Why oh why (Score:4, Funny)
couldn't somebody at the credit company do this...and not get caught?
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Thats the problem, you have to trust your Engineers to do their job. Sometimes that trust is breached. To me a dirty engineer is almost as bad as a dirty cop.
Zero vs. Less Than Zero (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't zero be an improvement over negative whatever?
That's okay (Score:2)
They might have gone down for a few days, but surely they have recent system back-ups to restore from, and daily backups to restore the data from. ...Right? Please?
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Furthermore based on the level of ineptitude already displayed by Fannie Mae, I wouldn't hold out much hope that they even run backups.
They can probably go back and get all the information off paper records though...
I see how he did it... (Score:2, Insightful)
They fired him. And let him have some access before he left.
Not a good idea. Sadly, you have to be aware of the threat. If you're firing someone with admin access, you should meet with them in a room without a workstation, explain the situation, and send them back to their desk to clean it out - with a monitor to ensure their workstation stays turned off.
While you're having the meeting, someone shuts down their workstation, disables network access, and - if not concurrently - immediately revokes their pr
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I was just coming here to post something similar to this
Over the years, there have been numerous "ASK SLASHDOT" and otherwise categorized posts here on the subject of discharge procedures. "I got laid off, and they made me pack up my stuff in front of someone who watched me and then escorted me out of the building. It was humiliating." That kind of thing.
Well, this event illustrates why some places decide to do it that way. FNMA didn't do it that way with this guy, and he took advantage of the time
Re:I see how he did it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the way around this would be a "deadman switch" that required input NOT to trash the system.
I have always said this is the wrong approach (Score:2)
The "Fight Club" style of "getting back at the Man" isn't very practical. There would be some period of disarray, but if you really want to screw things royally, you would introduce random, but very small data errors that hopefully get overlooked. Over time, these affect the balance sheets, the "business algorithms" in place, and generally make it a nightmare to figure out how to fix things. All of this "silent data corruption" would be propagated to disaster recovery systems. Your "backup tapes" would
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Congratulations! You have won today's daily "evil bastard" award :) or should that be >;)
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).
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The report is obviously not a techy. Its "IP Address"!
But is the reporter a science guy?
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The real question is how did they prove he was the person at the keyboard at the time the IP address was used?
ZING!!
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They don't need to, I'm sure that:
1- he was fired that day
2- the edits came from his account
3- the login came from his workstation
Thats more than enough evidence to convict, unless he can prove otherwise. Don't think you need to be caught red-handed with photographic proof to be sent to prison. Circumstantial evidence is more than enough unless you have a good defense.
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Bruce Schneier is right; security is a process, not a product. The internal threats are just as great, if not greater, than the external ones.
And it appears their security process was rather good - they caught and stopped the threat in time.
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Because of a bug in the script which made it error...
Re:Security is a process (Score:4, Funny)
Which is obviously part of their overall security policy, to only hire incompetent programmers.
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Back to a more serious note. The summary does hint it would have taken them down for a week, so I assume they have some form of backup and recovery in place...
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One would think if the sys admin's who opted in reporting this issue and provided technical details to law enforcement would know whether it was actually malicious.
If you were caught using a blink or marquee tag, then you owe your teacher a debt of gratitude.
I got a hearing front of the superintendent for ctrl-C'n out of a batch login prompt, and playing a $5 star trek diskette from a magazine type distribution. They threatened expulsion, but settled for a string of Saturday detentions. I'm glad that happ