Recently, rba posted a short blurb about an ongoing case in San Francisco about an apparently disgruntled computer system engineer who had locked out all the other system administrations from the city's computer network.
Here's a bit more on the story, via the article The Story Behind San Francisco's Rogue Network Admin by Paul Venezia, InfoWorld, Saturday, July 19, 2008 5:20 AM PDT:
_____
A key point made in the e-mail is that Childs' managers and co-workers all knew that he was the only person with administrative access to the network. In fact, it was apparently known and accepted in many levels of the San Francisco IT department. Again, quoting from the e-mail:
"This is where it gets tricky for the prosecution, IMO, because the localized authentication, with Terry as sole administrator, has been in place for months, if not years. His coworkers knew it (my coworkers and I were told many times by Terry's coworkers, "If your request has anything to do with the FiberWAN, it'll have to wait for Terry. He's the only one with access to those routers"). His managers knew it.
Other network engineers for the other departments of the City knew it. And everyone more or less accepted it.
[...snip...]
My source appears to believe that Childs' motivation was the antithesis of tampering, and that Childs did everything possible to maintain the integrity of the network, perhaps to a fault
[...snip...]
Rather than a case of a rogue administrator attempting to cause damage to the network by locking out other administrators, this may be a case of an overprotective admin who believed he was protecting the network -- and by extension, the city -- from other administrators whom he considered inferior, and perhaps even dangerous. One important fact seems to be in Childs' favor, if reports that the network has continued to run smoothly since his arrest are true.. My source corroborates this.
"As for the impact of [Childs'] actions to the rest of the City, the mayor's statement basically has it right. The network is completely up and running. No servers that I'm aware of are affected. No one has had any downtime (yet). But until they get back into those routers, they can't make any changes. I don't know yet if Terry's lockout applies only to the FiberWAN or also to the other routers, firewalls, switches, etc. in the City network."
_____
Additional information and another angle on the story can be found in the article Who Is the San Francisco Hacker? by Damon Poeter, ChannelWeb, 7:15 PM EDT Fri. Jul. 18, 2008:
_____
Childs stands accused of causing losses in excess of $200,000 and on Friday, a Department of Technology official said there were still "huge portions that Mr. Childs locked everyone out of."
But the official, Department of Technology deputy chief Ron Vinson, also insisted that "we have control over our FiberWAN network. ... We continue to work with our forensics team that we brought on to regain access, but we have maintained operability. We have not seen any downtime."
_____
So, stubborn hero or petulant employee? And is the City being a tad harsh on him, regardless?
This is an Open Thread.
