A former Unix engineer for Fannie Mae, has been accused of planting malicious code on the corporation’s network that was to “destroy and alter” all of the data on the company’s servers this Saturday.
Via Computerworld: Fannie Mae engineer indicted for planting server bomb
Note that they estimated the impact to be 1 week downtime (6th paragraph from the bottom). To me, this makes the story believable and the subtitle slightly exaggerated: clearly, not literally all of Fannie’s data would have been lost. Nonetheless I am surprised that any one person, let alone a “pass-through contractor” would have sufficient privileges to do that much damage. Not saying it’s easy to prevent this but I think it’s possible and I would have thought financial institutions had this covered.
And of course his access should have been completely disabled before he was let go, not a few hours later.