San Francisco’s unfolding cliffhanger, with a city network administrator holding the city’s network hostage, sound’s like a “B” movie plot –- but it represents the real threat that IT departments face, says Network World.
Infoworld may have the inside scoop:
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.
Terry Childs, 43, is accused of creating a single password and denying any other administrator access to the system. He has refused to give anyone else the password, authorities say.
City prosecutors and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom were still seeking to resolve the crisis by having experts try to take back the city’s compromised network from Childs, who was arrested when he refused to relinquish network control.
There’s worry that Childs, who has worked for the city for five years but faced firing for alleged poor performance, may have installed the means to electronically destroy sensitive documents.
Terry Childs was locked up in lieu of $5m bail last weekend, after the city accused him of creating a super password for its new FiberWan network, and locking out other users.
The Network World article also lists some potential vendor solutions for IT managers.
It probably doesn’t bode well for San Francisco’s draft feasibility study for “fiber-to-the-premise” networking, either.
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the ’super password’ that the press is throwing around is ridiculous. access to the hardware means any password is irrelevant. the san francisco IT dept can remove the password, but they might not have a backup of the configuration file. that might have to be rebuilt which would mean downtime of hours or days. thats the cost, some downtime. rather than starting to pay that now, it looks like they’re waiting in hopes of getting the password and skipping the downtime/reconfiguration.
Left by Don Park on July 18th, 2008