14 DAY TRIAL // A former UNIX engineer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for planting a logic bomb with the purpose of bringing Fannie Mae's entire computer network down.
Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, 36, of Montgomery County, Maryland, was sentenced U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz yesterday after a federal jury found him guilty of computer intrusion at the beginning of October.
Makwana worked as a contractor at Fannie Mae's Urbana Technology Center between 2006 and October 24, 2008, when he was fired. His job gave him administrative access to the mortgage giant's servers.
On October 29, 2008, during a routine check, a senior Fannie Mae systems engineer noticed a hidden unauthorized script scheduled to execute on January 31, 2009.
The script's purpose was to propagate through the entire computer network, delete data from all its 5,000 servers and lock administrators out with the message "Server Graveyard."
Investigators estimated that, had the program ran as intended, Fannie Mae's network would have been disabled for a week, leading to millions of dollars in losses.
By analyzing the logs, the program was traced back to the IP address assigned to Makwana's work laptop. Investigators determined that it was uploaded on October 24, the same day when the computer engineer emailed his family in India to tell them not to return to the United States.
"Computer intrusion cases are a high priority for federal law enforcement because of the potential to cause serious damage. Mr. Makwana was trusted with access to the computer system, and he violated that trust," said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein.
Incidents of disgruntled employees taking revenge on companies by disrupting their IT infrastructure are relatively common. The most famous case is that of Terry Childs, the former San Francisco computer engineer who held the city's multimillion-dollar network hostage for almost two weeks in 2008 after learning of his impending dismissal.