A federal court in the United States accused an ex-employee at Fannie Mae for deliberately setting the servers to automatically erase all of the corporation’s data on January 31 at 9 AM.

In an Operation Mayhem manner, it seems that the 35-year-old man Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana allegedly inserted malicious code to the servers of the Federal National Mortgage Association in order to change all of its data with null values.

If the former IT administrator managed to do this, it would have been literally a disaster for the company, along with the entire financial business sector in the U.S., as Fannie Mae keeps track of a large number of mortgage operations.  The damage would have been even greater, considering the hard times that the American society is facing these days, due to the economic crisis.

Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana had been an IT administrator at Fannie Mae for three years, when he was noticed that his contract would be interrupted on October 24, 2008. The Indian citizen’s position at the Urbana Technology Center in Maryland, headquarters of the company’s electronic database, meant that he had full access to all the data on the servers of Fannie Mae.

It seems that the company did not remove his account permissions to the servers after he had left, so Makwana supposedly worked on a malicious code that he inserted to all the data on the servers’ database.

As the authorities tracked him through the IP address used to insert the code, Makwana was arrested and might stay in jail for as long as ten years.