The FBI says it’s foiled a bomb attack on the government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae. But the alleged offender shunned dynamite and semtex for an attack of pure logic.

Contractor Rajendrasinh Makwana is due in court today accused of computer intrusion. He’s accused of installing a malicious code which was set to take effect tomorrow and wipe out data across the company’s network.

An FBI evidence statement says Makwana was fired by Fannie Mae for computer misconduct on Oct. 24 last year but did not have his network access cut off for several hours. During this time he allegedly planted a malicious script within a legitimate script which ran every morning.

Makwana is said to have used a logic bomb: a piece of code which is buried in a system and doesn’t go off until a particular condition is met. In this case, the condition was the date, with the payload being set to unload on Jan. 31.

The script would have blocked a monitoring system, blocked access to the server the script was on, then overwritten all files on the firm’s 4,000 servers with a string of 0s. As well as wiping out data files, this would have removed the back-up software installed on the software.

Fannie Mae engineers say the damage would have been repairable but it would likely have involved shutting the firm down for as long as a week and cost millions of dollars. They would have had to first reinstall the back-up software on each server before restoring data from external back-ups.

The script was discovered by an engineer at Fannie Mae on Oct. 29. It’s unclear if Makwana’s court date and the public revelation of the plot coming the day before the attack would have taken place is merely a coincidence.

Makwana is currently free on $100,000 bail.

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Entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 2:26 pm under Hacking, Legal, Security.

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