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Former Fannie Mae Engineer Imprisoned for Planting Malware

Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana (36), a former Fannie Mae computer engineer of Montgomery (Southern US) has been convicted for planting a concealed malware.

A federal jury of FBI convicted Makwana on 4th Oct. 2010 of computer attacks cropping up from the transmission of malicious script to Fannie Mae's computer servers.

The decision was announced by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein and Richard A (Special Agent in Charge). After the stringent analysis of computer logs and Makwana's laptop and other proofs, McFeely of the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that he was the mastermind behind malware propagation.

According to the reports, he had transmitted the malicious code on October 24, 2008 which was planned to be executed on January 31, 2009. The malicious code was intended to be circulated throughout the Fannie Mae network of computers and destroy all data, comprising financial, securities, and mortgage information.

After five days of Makwana's leaving the company, another engineer came across a hidden malicious script, which was all set to execute a malicious payload on January 31, 2009 at 9:00 am. It is believed that the malicious code activated sudden system alerts, which in turn led to its revelation.

As per the prosecutors, anyone who tried to log in to the network on 31st January would have got a message stating "Server Graveyard".

According to the FBI investigators' estimation if the malicious script had been triggered off then operations at Fannie Mae would have been completely disabled or closed for not less than a week. Resultantly, this would have incurred the company losses worth millions of dollars and other expenditures because the attack was aimed at crippling the network monitoring systems and destroying all data and information from the company's 5,000 servers.

According to the reports Makwana was sentenced for 10 years in prison. The U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz ordered sentencing for December 8, 2010 at 9:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, the security experts stated that the incident confirms the fact that in spite of the recent increase in complicated targeted attacks, dissatisfied current and former employees remains the biggest hazard to corporate networks.

Related article: Former Council Intern Charged with Intruding City E-mail

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