Fannie Mae Hacker Pleads Not Guilty

The Fannie Mae employee that we reported last week who allegedly planted a virus in a server has plead not guilty. 35-Year-old Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana was a senior unix engineer contractor for Fannie Mae, the company that says Makwana planted malicious code at the end of an existing script that would have run on January 31st, 2009 and infected other servers in the enterprise. The script would have wiped data out and caused millions of dollars worth of damage to the company.

If Makwana is convicted he would face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. He is currently out of jail under pretrial supervision. The trial date will be set sometime in February.

Engineers at Fannie Mae quickly locked down all of the existing servers and removed the code from the existing script before it could do any harm on the 31st of January.