He’s handed over the passcode to the Mayor, Gavin Newsom. It seems he came to his senses and he also seems to have VERY little faith in the IT administration for the SF government network.

“The first thing I want you to know, Mr. Mayor, is that when you walk out of this room, you will have the computer codes.”

Those words – delivered to Mayor Gavin Newsom by imprisoned city computer tech Terry Childs in a small, fourth-floor room at city jail Monday – signaled the beginning of the end of the weeklong standoff in which San Francisco officials found themselves in the embarrassing position of being locked out of their own computer system.

Childs – whom some have described as a friendly, hard worker at the city Technology Department, and others have labeled an over-the-top control freak – has been sitting in jail since July 13 on $5 million bail, after being arrested for reconfiguring key passwords in the city’s computer system.

He handed the details over without too much trouble or persuasion by the looks of it, I guess he realised he was actually in quite serious trouble and he should comply or face a stiff sentence.

He might the right choice I think.

A team of code crackers brought in from Cisco Systems had been working around the clock to try to decipher Childs’ codes, but with only marginal success.

“It wasn’t cheap and I just couldn’t see us keep spending that kind of money,” Newsom said.

Then, out of the blue, Childs’ lawyer, Erin Crane, called the mayor’s office Monday afternoon, offering a jailhouse meeting.

Childs, according to the lawyer, was ready to give up the codes – but only to the mayor, who had gone out of his way in his public comments not to portray Childs as some sort of monster.

Newsom didn’t hesitate. Without asking the city attorney for an opinion or giving a heads up to police or the district attorney, he was at the Hall of Justice in half an hour.

Well at least we can have faith in our Cisco equipment, even the Cisco guys themselves can’t crack it so there’s no backdoor!

It’ll be interesting to see how this case develops and what happens to Mr Childs after this.

Source: SFGate

He got a pretty hefty sentence, now we have another who has locked everyone out of the new ’state of the art’ computer network in San Fransisco – he’s on a $5 million dollar bail so I’d say he’s in big trouble too.

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.

He was pretty well paid it seems and he must have had top level access to the entire WAN infrastructure as he has managed to lock everyone out. Thankfully the system is still running and there appears to have been no damage so far but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some backdoor or logic bomb that can wipe out all the records and data.

I think the Government and the law enforcement guys need to handle this very carefully.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

He was taken into custody Sunday. City officials said late Monday that they had made some headway into cracking his pass codes and regaining access to the system.

Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him.

“They weren’t able to do it – this was kind of his insurance policy,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the attempted firing was a personnel matter.

Seems like he was trying to play the get out of jail free card…I’m not sure it’ll work though. I’d say he’s heading for big trouble…and however secure it is if they have physical access to the systems it’s only a matter of time before they crack his passwords and regain control of the system.

Then Mr. Childs your power play is finished and you are looking at a few years of having your backdoor cracked..

Source: SFGate