Terry Childs, a network administrator for the city of San Francisco, CA (USA), has been charged with computer tampering in a highly significant case. Mr. Childs is reportedly Cisco certified and the lead network engineer for the city, a place he worked for several years.
Unlike cases where hackers sabotage networks to cause excessive downtime or steal data, no such damage has apparently taken place in San Francisco (yet). Instead, Mr Childs has allegedly prevented anyone else but himself from being able to manage core components of the city network by making unauthorized changes to the access controls of routers. He now faces multiple U.S. felony court charges.
Some news reports have asserted this "ego driven" man has effectively "taken hostage" San Francisco's computer network, but many key facts surrounding this matter are still in doubt. Certainly, though, many Information Technology managers have feared this worst-case scenario happening to their network.
→ Read more - The Story Behind San Francisco's Rogue Network Admin
With the access also comes the responsibilty to use the means wisely and for the better of the coworkers and the establishment. What Mr. child’s did was a kind of jealous things to do. Keeping access to only himself is not how the business world works. He should have known better . I hope he can work out some kind of deal with the city and use his certification for the good cause of the public.
From everything that I have read about this case so far, Terry Childs was doing his job according to his contract. Part of his job is to keep this very large and expensive network out of the hands of others who could bring it down completely. The damage was done once others did finally take over the network after he gave the passwords to the SF Mayor.
He may have gotten one of the biggest shafts in computing history.