A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.

Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, was indicted (.pdf) Tuesday in federal court in Maryland on a single count of computer sabotage for allegedly writing and planting the malicious code on Oct. 24, the day he was fired from his job. The malware had been set to detonate at 9:00 a.m. on Jan. 31, but was instead discovered by another engineer five days after it was planted, according to court records.

Makwana, an Indian national, was a consultant who worked full time on-site at Fannie Mae's massive data center in Urbana, Maryland, for three years.

On the afternoon of Oct. 24, he was told he was being fired because of a scripting error he'd made earlier in the month, but he was allowed to work through the end of the day, according to an FBI affidavit (.pdf) in the case.  "Despite Makwana's termination, Makwana's computer access was not immediately terminated," wrote FBI agent Jessica Nye.

Five days later, another Unix engineer at the data center discovered the malicious code hidden inside a legitimate script that ran automatically every morning at 9:00 a.m. Had it not been found, the FBI says the code would have executed a series of other scripts designed to block the company's monitoring system, disable access to the server on which it was running, then systematically wipe out all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, overwriting all their data with zeroes.

"This would also destroy the backup software of the servers making the restoration of data more difficult because new operating systems would have to be installed on all servers before any restoration could begin," wrote Nye.

As a final measure, the logic bomb would have powered off the servers.

The trigger code was hidden at the end of the legitimate program, separated by a page of blank lines. Logs showed that Makwana had logged onto the server on which the logic bomb was created in his final hours on the job.

Makwana is free on a $100,000 signature bond. His lawyer didn't immediately return a phone call Thursday.

[col. writ. 10/1/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
By the time you read this the $700 billion bailout will have been old news, one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history.

But it will not heal that which ails the nation as it trips and stumbles like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

The reasons are simple.

For the problems are systemic, built into the rapacious nature of the machinery humming all around us. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption of democratic forms at the service of the financial services industry is a bottomless maw, a gaping mouth that is never sated.

Why was there no alarm when millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures made inevitable by variable mortgage rates? When millions lost manufacturing jobs to low paying service gigs? When living standards crumbled, and when take home pay fell to 1973 levels?

Where was the alarm?

There was no alarm -- for this was the 'blind hand of the market' at work, the leveling way of globalism, the new world order moving through, preparing the way for the triumph of capitalism uber alles.

Few were the politicians who gave voice to this immense social suffering. Fewer still used their power to try to assuage their pain, for they too were drunk on the wine of globalism.

But when the ripples spread upwards, from the foreclosed homes to the foreclosing banks -and from the banks to investment houses, Congress stirred from their drunken stupor, and rang alarm bells loudest.

"It's an economic 9/11!", some bellowed; "It's a financial tsunami!", yelled others.

When Americans were hoodwinked into ruinous sub-prime loans, and millions were faced with foreclosures, where was the alarm?

More importantly, where was the help for those who were endangered?

Nowhere. Nowhere.

If they helped them the present economic crisis would've been mitigated.

Instead, we're in a situation where a scam artist sets up shop in a street-corner, playing a fraudulent 3-card monty hustle, and along comes a cop. The cop, instead of rousting the scam artist, rifles the pockets of every passerby, and delivers the stolen loot to the scammer.

The scam artist, of course, is the financial investment houses; the cop, of course, is Congress -- and you are the passerby, hustled and robbed by both of them.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, 160 years ago, that the State was but the executive for capitalist. After what we are all seeing, who can doubt it?

The Empire is crumbling.

--(c) '08 maj

The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!

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Snipped from Boing Boing...

Not the first line you want to read in the top story in every major newspaper on the first day of the week. There it is, though. Today was one of the most bleak days ever in Wall Street's history, and Monday looks like it's gonna suck. The headlines will surely be easy to find; I'm publishing this post mostly just to create an open thread for the Hackbloc community to discuss whatever unfolds, and where it all leads. Snip from today's lead item in the WSJ:

The American financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. faced the prospect of liquidation, and Merrill Lynch & Co. agreed to be sold to Bank of America Corp. The U.S. government, which bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a week ago and orchestrated the sale of Bear Stearns Cos. to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in March, played much tougher with Lehman. It refused to provide a financial backstop to potential buyers. Without such support, Barclays PLC and Bank of America, the two most interested buyers, walked away. Late Sunday night, Lehman said it intends to file for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Hang on to your bindles, friends.

Here's more on insurer AIG's related meltdown, and here's the article from which the preceding graf was snipped: Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters, Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash (Wall Street Journal). Greenspan today characterized this as a "once-in-a-century" crisis. Referring to smaller regional institutions most vulnerable to consolidation -- commercial banks, not the troubled investment banks at the center of this news cycle -- one particularly pessimistic investor quoted by CNBC predicts "a thousand banks will close" in the coming months. Krugman in the NYT: "Will the U.S. financial system collapse today, or maybe over the next few days? I don’t think so — but I’m nowhere near certain."

BB commenter Seg says:

For anyone wanting a primer on how the mortgage crises started, I highly recommend listening to the whole hour of This American Life: #355: The Giant Pool of Money. It's the best reporting I have ever heard on anything, let alone the housing crises. While it doesn't go beyond events after April 08, it will bring you mostly up to speed.

</snip>

I Reposted this in hope that the HackBloc community could discuss this, how this will affect those of us in a America and the rest of us in the world.  I would say it is a safe bet that we are heading into another great depression, and that it will soon be hard to find jobs.  For those that are already rich, they will find themselves middle class. And for the middle class they will find themselves impoverished.  And for the poor, things will probably not change much, except there will be more poor.  If you have an older relative that was alive during the depression talk to them, it may be very interesting.  I would like to know what other people think is going to happen.  How bad will this storm be?