The contracted Fannie Mae engineer indicted Tuesday by the Justice Department for allegedly planting a logic bomb represents the beginning of a trend of insider attacks responding to layoffs and job insecurity because of the weak economy, experts say. ‘To me, this is the tip of the iceberg,’ said Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of security company Cenzic. ‘If a small percentage of these IT workers are going to the dark side, they could potentially cause a lot of damage.’ Federal investigators indicted Rajendrashinh Makwana, 35, a contracted Unix engineer for mortgage finance company Fannie Mae, for allegedly embedding malicious code known as a logic bomb in the mortgage lender’s computer network, which was set to detonate on Jan. 31, 2009. Had the attack been successful, the malware could have destroyed the entirety of the data on all 4,000 of the mortgage finance company’s servers and shut down the company for a week, experts say. The malware in Fannie Mae’s servers was thwarted when another engineer detected the malicious code, embedded with legitimate script. However, experts say that in many other cases, malicious code planted from the inside might not be so easily detected, especially […]