A fired Fannie Mae contract worker pleaded not guilty Friday to a federal charge he planted a virus designed to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant’s 4,000 computer servers nationwide.
Had the virus been released as planned on Saturday, the Justice Department said the disruption could have cost millions of dollars and shut down operations for a week at Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage finance company.
Rajendrasinh B. Makwana, 35, of Glen Allen, Virginia, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to one count of computer intrusion, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Makwana’s federal public defender, Christopher C. Nieto, didn’t return calls seeking comment on the case.
The Associated Press was unable to reach Makwana in Glen Allen, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. A search of public records found no address or telephone number for him there.
Makwana is an Indian citizen who has lived in the United States since at least 2001, according to public records.
He was fired Oct. 24 from his computer programming job at Fannie Mae’s data center in Urbana, about 35 miles from the company’s Washington headquarters, where he had worked since 2006, according to the Justice Department. He was fired for erroneously writing programming instructions two weeks earlier that changed the settings on the servers, according to an FBI affidavit.
Fannie Mae did not immediately terminate Makwana’s computer access after telling him he was fired early on the afternoon of Oct. 24, the affidavit states. Before surrendering his badge and laptop computer about 3 1/2 hours later, the indictment accused Makwana of “intentionally and without authorization caused and attempted to cause damage to Fannie Mae’s computer network by entering malicious code.”
As first reported by The (Washington) Examiner, the code “would have resulted in destroying and altering all of the data on Fannie Mae servers,” the indictment…