something about this smelled from the very beginning
Many news sources are saying that Terry Childs, an IT admin for the city and county of San Francisco is holding the city hostage…..or is he? I mean, c’mon, I’ve seen plenty of technical incompetence with city hall before. Street crime cameras, anyone? The bigger the incompetence at SF city hall, the bigger the contract. Just look at Tenderloin Housing Clinic…duh
could this be a case of SF officials going to extreme lengths to cover their own ass?
One clue most are overlooking
A clue as to the actual nature of the lockout has come from statements that it might cost the city “millions of dollars” to unlock the system.
Millions? Really?
Unless Childs managed to install BIOS or kernel-level disk encryption on all the servers or stuff M80s in the server drive bays, there’s no way that the cost of “unlocking” the network would run into the millions of dollars. Since officials are talking publicly about bringing in Cisco experts to undo the damage, it may be safe to assume that what Childs did was change the login to some or all of the routers and switches running the network.
and now there’s this revelation
“A source with direct knowledge of San Francisco’s IT infrastructure has tipped off Paul Venezia to the real story behind Terry Childs’ lockout of San Francisco’s network, providing a detailed account of the city’s FiberWAN, interdepartmental politics, and Terry Childs himself. Childs pleaded not guilty to charges of tampering yesterday and is being held on $5 million bail. According to the source, Childs’ purview was limited to the city’s FiberWAN — a network he himself built and, believing no one competent enough to touch the network but himself, guarded religiously, sharing details with no one, including routing configuration and log-in information. Childs was so concerned about the network’s security that he refused even to write router and switch configurations to flash. But what may prove difficult for the prosecution in its case against Childs is that his restricted access to the network was widely known and accepted among managers and the city’s other network engineers. Venezia, who has been suspicious of the official story from the start, suspects that the Childs case may be that ‘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.’ Further evidence is that fact that the network, from what Venezia understands, has been running smoothly since Childs’ arrest.”
you’ve heard of making backups, haven’t you?
That’s my first reaction to the news. Critical infrastructure should have redundancy everywhere, including the support staff.
To give a stupid but obvious example what if Childs was run over by a car? OK, he wouldn’t care but all the rest of SF would.
So they should never have put the network online until the information was in several places (the brains of several people if formal electronic/paper records were too inflexible).
Stll, this sounds like political infighting more than ever. Given the situation why were they trying to fire a critical person like Childs? Sounds like some bureaucrat with an ego as big as Childs would be involved to cause this, rather than Childs “going rogue”. And he (the bureaucrat) was more skilled in the political game. Of course this person would be covering his tracks, and not be obvious in any way. So Childs and the whole of SF lost. His firing does not make sense otherwise, given his critical position.
Ah, the fun of weaving conspiracy theories :-)