Wouldn't it have been fun, after all of Fannie Mae's other woes, their entire IT system-consisting of 4,000 servers, just up and crashed? Had it not been for a chance discovery, that would have happened tomorrow morning.

Imagine if, after 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, anyone trying to log on to Fannie Mae servers was greeted with an error message reading "Server Graveyard." If Rajendrasinh Makwana did what a federal grand jury thinks he did, Fannie Mae would have been sent back to the 19th Century.

The grand jury indicted Makwana yesterday for allegedly planting a virus on Fannie Mae's system on October 24, the day he was fired. The hidden code was set like a time bomb to execute at 9:00 a.m., January 31, 2009. A senior engineer discovered the malicious code "only by chance" of scrolling down past a blank page four days later.

Investigators traced the attacker's IP address back to Makwana's company-issued laptop. He was arrested January 7.

Yesterday, Purdue University released its Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information report, which warns against internal sabotage in times of economic troubles. In addition to grudges, like in Makwana's case, researchers fear corporate "cyber moles," or financially troubled employees would be tempted to steal vital information and sell it on the cybermafia-run data black market.

A Ukrainian Web hosting provider that, according to published reports, has long served as home base to a prolific and invasive family of malicious software has been taken offline following abuse reports from Security Fix to the company's Internet provider. Since at least 2005, and perhaps earlier, an entity known as UkrTeleGroup Ltd. has hosted hundreds of Web servers that control a vast network of computers infected with some variant of "DNSChanger," according to security software vendor McAfee, which monitors worldwide malware. DNSChanger is a Trojan horse program that changes the host system's settings so that all of the Internet traffic flowing to and from the infected computer is sent through servers controlled by the attackers. In a report issued last month, McAfee said it found more than 400 DNS servers on UkrTeleGroup's network that appeared to be set up to to re-direct Web traffic for systems infected with DNSChanger.

The global recession may have hit Europe hard, but there's still one business that's thriving in these lean economic times: Italy's organized crime syndicates.

The Italian mafia's revenue for 2008 jumped 40 percent, reports Bloomberg.com.

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Section: Computers, Security, Software / ApplicationsCoSoSys, a vendor of applications for portable storage devices and endpoint security systems, joined in the celebration o13 Vote(s)

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