Rogue admin waits for verdict
BOFH faces jail for password refusal
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San Francisco's rogue sysadmin Terry Childs, who refused to reveal passwords when he was sacked, could learn his fate later today.
The jury has started deliberating on whether Childs is guilty of locking the city out of its own network. He faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. Childs refused to hand over passwords when he was sacked in 2008.
Childs' defence is that this was an employment dispute which got out of hand. They say the BOFH refused to hand over passwords because he believed the people demanding them, during a conference call, were not capable of following proper security procedures.
Closing arguments were heard yesterday and the jury looked relieved that no more evidence would be presented, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
After 12 days, during which the FibreWAN worked perfectly, Childs was visited in prison by San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom and agreed to hand over the passwords.
He was charged with various computer offences in mid-2008. The trial began in December. ®
COMMENTS
The guy wasn't his boss...
Once they had sacked him, the "idiot" was no longer his boss. If he is no longer an employee, he has no obligation to tell them anything. The only mistake here was that the "City" didn't ask for the passwords BEFORE they sacked him. Once he was gone they decided to cry "we've been hacked" retrospectively.
This is the equivalent of me getting fired from work, being frogmarched off the premises, then a week later the police turning up at my house because my ex-boss realises he didn't ask me for my set of keys, so he's decided to report me for breaking and entering even tho I've been nowhere near the office since I drove out of the car-park that day.
This is just incorrect
He handed over admin passwords as soon as he was in a room alone with his boss. He refused to hand them over in full view of a bunch of HR people and a couple of regular cops. Would you want HR to have the admin passes to your cities critical infrastructure?
I can hardly believe
That his bail is still 5 million.
That some tech company didn't pay the bail.
That he's been in jail nearly 2 years, even though nothing broke and he did give up the passwords.
That at some point, somebody at the city did not step in and find a better way to handle this.
That he stayed so quiet.
All he needed was a few publicity hound lawyers to file lawsuits, and go on talk shows to point out every wasted dollar and paint everyone at the city as incompetent bozos.
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