San Francisco BOFH must cough up $1.5m
Legendary rogue admin cops hefty damages
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San Francisco admin Terry Childs must pay nearly $1.5m for bringing down the city's network for 12 days.
On Tuesday, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Superior Court Judge Teri Jackson ordered Childs to pay the City of San Francisco $1,485,791.
Childs got four years' prison last year for effectively locking city officials out of their own network by refusing to hand over passwords. By the time of sentencing, he'd already been in prison for two years. Lawyers demanded the money as restitution to pay back the council for money spent trying to regain access to their own network.
Childs said at the time that he did not trust officials who demanded access. He finally handed over the phrases to San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom during a prison visit.
At the time of sentencing, San Francisco claimed the downtime had cost the city $900,000. Childs, 46, was arrested in July 2008 for preventing access to the city's FiberWAN network, which carried about 60 per cent of the network traffic for city departments. Childs worked for the city's Department of Technology. ®
COMMENTS
Um am I missing an interesting point here
but after being dismissed, where is his legal obligation to tell his former employees anything, other than possibly "blow me". As long as you can say. It's in the password safe or yep that was documented you have no further legal obligation to tell the fuckers anything.
Idiot, but I can understand why he did it...
I seem to recall he was accused and fired on the basis of incompetence by his employer... part of his defence was that if he was so incompetent how come it required the manufacturer many days, with physical access to equipment to "break into the network"... In other words he clearly wasn't incompetent at his core job role. However his managers who failed to ensure they had root access to their own systems could clearly be considered to be at least naive if not incompetent.
I in no way condone what he did, and in my opinion it was grossly unprofessional and tarnishes all professional network engineer's reputations, but I can understand his argument and his grievance against his employer.
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