Yesterday, computer programmer Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, a former contractor for Fannie Mae, was convicted of designing and planting a malicious code in the Fannie Mae computer network that, if allowed to propagate as planned, would have destroyed all data in the Fannie Mae electronic system[1]. That’s right: financial information, securities data and all the details on the myriad mortgages held by the GSE.

Apparently Makwana worked at a Fannie Mae facility in Urbana, Maryland for about two years. He is a UNIX engineer and dealt with nearly 5,000 computer servers as part of his job responsibilities. On October 29, 2008, the engineer was fired and, as part of that process, turned in all of his Fannie Mae equipment, including his laptop. A few days later, another engineer “discovered a malicious script embedded in a routine program.” On the day of his firing, Makwana had transmitted the code. It was set to execute on January 31, 2009 and “destroy all data” in its path.

In most companies, this type of coding sabotage would have been a major inconvenience, but not a catastrophe. And in the case of Fannie Mae, the actual ramifications of the virus would not have been total chaos ad infinitum, but, in reality, more like a week offline while remote archives were used to recreate the data lost. In fact, some experts argue that the real issue is that Makwana was an H1B visa worker from India who was just one of many “exploited by companies such as Fannie Mae only because programmers coming from India work cheaper”[2]. In fact, at the time of the original arrest in 2009, John Dvorak, a columnist for Marketwatch.com, pointed out that “there is no way of knowing much about any of these folks, and that immediately becomes a homeland security issue.”

Thanks to his conviction yesterday, Makwana faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for “computer intrusion.” His sentence has not yet been announced.

[1]http://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news20940/maryland-unix-engineer-convicted-attempting-destroy-fannie-mae-data
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-curious-case-of-rajendrasinh-b-makwana