Jul 31 2008
Terry Childs – good or bad?
For the benefit of all readers, Terry Childs is the San Francisco, California’s FiberWAN Network Engineer/Administrator who is charged and accused of withholding administrative access to the city’s network and is now behind bars with a $5Million bail (too steep).
Based on the information I gathered online, Terry Childs has his own personal reasons why he did those security procedures.
“Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password,” Crane said. “His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it … and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves.”
from SFGate
It’s a good thing Childs cooperated by giving the codes/script/s only to the mayor (Gavin Newsom) himself when mayor Newsom visited him in jail.
“Even though the rest of the system’s administrators feared that Child’s actions might lead to very troublesome situation, the system seems to be working fine and there are just a few more glitches to fix in order for everything to return to normal.”
from efluxmedia.com
The case of Terry Childs just prove that Systems Administrators have a big responsibility and powerful on any system or network infrastructure, but can be controlled by implementing policies.
Top managements should also be aware of the existing system and network implementations and should assign to at least a minimum of two (2) technical personnels for all administrative accesses.
Documentations of access codes and regular drills can also minimize these kinds of problems.
So it is up for you to decide if Terry Childs is either good or bad.