Report: IT Admin Locks up San Francisco's Network (PC World)

PC World ^ | Jul 15, 2008 | Robert McMillan

[Tolkien]

- A network administrator has locked up a multimillion dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data and is refusing to give police the password, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code, the paper reported.

The new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) handles city payroll files, jail bookings, law enforcement documents and official e-mail for San Francisco. The network is functioning but administrators have little or no access.

[relictele]

FIGHT THE POWER!

Besides, with the computers down Newsom will have more time to bed his colleagues’ wives.

[romanesq]

Too funny. He should publicly say he will release the password when his demands are announced and then met on national TV.

It would be a riot. And couldn’t happen to a better town.

[dbacks]

[Besides, with the computers down Newsom will have more time to bed his colleagues’ wives.]

Does he care the sex, or for that matter, the species of those he boinks?

[wally_bert]

If it is Windoze based, offer a reward to a hacker and go Linux afterwards.

[VaRepublican]

Well......I thought windows was easily hacked so no big deal, right?

[chickadee]

I hope they lock the guy up and throw away the key. And for company, he can have a computer that give the message “no access” every time he clicks the mouse.

Network admins in bureaucracies are mean, brutish creatures with no people skills. They have ones and zeros where their hearts are supposed to be. Their mothers are Cold Fusion and their fathers are 404.

[shadowgovernment]

hmmmm, could be ICE and FBI investigations were getting a little toooo close..very convent to loose the data.

[alloysteel]

This is funny in so many ways (after all, it happened to SAN FRANCISCO!) but definitely with a sinister cast. This guy just has a bad attitude concerning the City of San Francisco, but supposing he had some agenda other than personal. Well, maybe he has, but so far, it has not been revealed.

The San Francisco police department should be ready to start waterboarding, and maybe that would not be a bad tool to have available.

[shadowgovernment]

convent = convenient

[thefactor]

"You're WELCOME!"

[HawaiianGecko]

Watch for San Francisco to be the first American city to water board an employee.

[Night Hides Not]

Methinks this dude watched “Office Space” too many times.

[Oldexpat]

We need a picture of the twerp to decide if he is guilty as charged.
He is probably a raging fag getting his revenge on the world.

[CougarGA7]

Never make your IT guy angry.

[Rebelbase]

Neo, follow the white rabbit.....

[NurdlyPeon]

And he said he wants a new car. One that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage. The police replied that if he would give up the codes, they would even throw in a Blaupunct.........

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

I once shut down a Control Data mainframe in Minneapolis inadvertently! I was at their computer tech school in Cleveland( a total scam on taxpayer's money by the way!). I signed on to take a test as Dr. Hysteresis, was distracted, and forgot to sign off. Somehow that shut things down. They traced it to Cleveland. The instructor had to ask the class who Dr. Hysteresis was. Unfortunately, I had gone out for lunch!

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I bet the SF crowd would gladly use waterboarding on the creep if it would get him to cough up the password.

Liberals have a very high standard of ethics when it comes to other people, but it's generally pretty low for themselves.

[TexasCajun]

Hack The World:

PW = obama08

[Celerity]

Next stop: ITHACA !

[McGruff]

Geeks Gone Wild!

[Stegall Tx]

I once shut down a Control Data mainframe in Minneapolis inadvertently!

I'm sure this could lead to a one-upsmanship contest here, but I once cut the long distance telephone service to half a dozen small towns for a couple of hours.

They had two fiber links and one was jittering, so I shut down the jittering one to force traffic over to the other side. What I didn't realize was the jitter was caused by the system trying to cut the traffic over automatically and the other fiber was completely down.

And, to make it a little bit better, the only communication link I had to the box that controlled the fiber was on the far end ... of the fiber I shut down.

We had to dispatch a tech to the site to log into the box on the local terminal. Ah, the wonders of not-so-modern technology.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Whoops! I’ll bet they wrote some new software after I crashed ‘em.

[scfirewall]

It’s what makes him “that guy”

[Nervous Tick]

Network admins in bureaucracies are mean, brutish creatures with no people skills. They have ones and zeros where their hearts are supposed to be.

You say that like it's a bad thing... ;-)

[Cheburashka]

Watch for San Francisco to be the first American city to water board an employee.

---

It may be the first city to do it to an employee “in the line of duty”, but it's San Francisco. There are probably ads in the yellow pages where you can pay to waterboard and/or to be waterboarded.

Maybe this guy's built up an immunity.

[Marie2]

Hey, he’s just subverting the dominant paradigm like all his liberal professors told him to.

[hadit2here]

I don’t understand the problem. Get a couple of geeky, 15 year old crackers, promise them cases of Jolt cola (does that still exist?), the latest PS3 and a date with a cute girl and they’d have the password (along with the network) cracked in a matter of minutes.

How difficult can an unknown password be? They are being cracked daily by the thousands.

Hmmmmm, I wonder if anyone has tried “1-2-3-4” or “password” yet?

[bert]

corrected.....San Fran ya know

.....Besides, with the computers down Newsom will have more time to bed his colleagues’ .......

[roadcat]

I've been posting replies on another thread.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2045579/posts

I've worked with Terry Childs, he's got the job I formerly had. Here's an update. Management often-times is the enemy - appointees of the mayor, or new hires from outside, without the requisite knowledge of computer systems.

Rumor-mill has it that Childs had a run-in with the newly-hired Security Chief. He caught her red-handed in pulling a hard drive from the former Security Chief's PC, which she sent out of the country to a friend in Europe. Definitely a no-no on several counts. Apparently the Security Chief had things to hide, and she broke the rules taking sensitive City information out of the country. Childs had arranged for mirroring the hard drive before it was taken, so even if she wipes data, Childs has a copy of her wrong-doing. That wrong-doing includes her installing key-logging software on others machines, including on Childs PC, in order for her to capture passwords. Another no-no by the Security Chief. And the proof is on that hard drive she absconded with.

Normally these issues are handled in-house, but the Security Chief called in the D.A.'s office in order to nail Childs, without going up the chain-of-command. She didn't realize Childs had the goods on her. Mayor Newsom is supposedly talking to Childs boss to get more info, and is trying to talk to Childs. The D.A. (Kamala Harris) is at odds with Newsom, and charged Childs and went public without discussing it with Mayor Newsom. Last I heard, is that Childs boss is clearing out his desk. Might mean he's being reassigned. He's my former boss, and always manages to survive these things.

Once Childs gets heard in court, all charges could potentially be dropped, and the Security Chief will be in hot water and could get charged with the original counts levied against Childs. The D.A. will have egg on her face.

So don't believe everything you read about Terry Childs. There's more going on here folks.

[atruelady]

Terry Childs real name is Jenkins. He was last seen hacking into the World of Warcraft game until he was destroyed by S.F. DA Kamala Harris, secretly named The Sword of a Thousand Truths.