On October 10, the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) today announced that Sathish Kumar Chandhun Rajendran, 36, of Sterling, Va., was sentenced on October 3, 2014, for engaging in unauthorized access to government servers that hosted a Fannie Mae website used to support federal mortgage loan modification programs, including the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, III presided over the hearing which took place in federal court in Alexandria, Va.
Rajendran was sentenced to three years of supervised release and will be required to perform 50 hours of community service. Restitution was ordered in the amount of $69,638, and Rajendran was ordered to forfeit ownership of the laptop computer from which he accessed federal website servers without authorization. Rajendran was also ordered to write and publish online an article detailing the particulars of the offense, its seriousness, its effect on himself and his family, and why others should not engage in similar behavior.
Rajendran was charged and pleaded guilty on July 10, 2014, to a one-count criminal information charging him with unauthorized access to a protected computer causing damage. In the plea agreement, Rajendran also agreed, for a period of three years following his conviction, to refrain from participating as an employee, contractor, or subcontractor in any government contract requiring clearance.
According to court documents, Rajendran worked at Fannie Mae as an Information Technology term employee and was assigned to the development of the www.CheckMyNPV.com website. The website was established under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in conjunction with the government’s Making Home Affordable (MHA) program. The online tool on the website, operated by Fannie Mae under the auspices of MHA, allowed homeowners to determine the net present value of their homes and check their eligibility to participate in HAMP, a federal program designed to prevent mass foreclosures.
After being terminated from employment in August 2013, Rajendran repeatedly used administrator credentials to log into government servers and make unauthorized changes to the CheckMyNPV website, including disabling the website’s online tool for calculating the net present value of homes and for checking HAMP eligibility. As a result of these actions, Rajendran caused damage and loss to the website in the amount of $69,638.
“Rajendran, a former federal IT contractor, crashed the functionality of www.CheckMyNPV.com which temporarily prevented struggling homeowners from using the site’s ‘net present value’ calculator to determine their eligibility for TARP’s housing program, HAMP,” said Christy Romero, Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP). “Those who stand in the way of homeowners getting the help they seek and need through HAMP will be held accountable and brought to justice by SIGTARP and our law enforcement partners.”
This case was investigated by SIGTARP and the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander T.H. Nguyen of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia is prosecuting the case.
This prosecution was brought in coordination with President Barack Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which was established to wage an aggressive and coordinated effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. SIGTARP is a member of the task force. To learn more about the President’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, please visit www.StopFraud.gov.
SOURCE: SIGTARP.gov
So why was he still able to login to the server after his employment terminated? Who screwed up there?