A disgruntled employee locks the city of San Francisco out of their network. There were so many fuck ups on the city’s part that the news article almost reads like a play-by-play on how not to handle this.
he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him
Tried to fire him? And what, missed and fired the wrong person? Even in this socialist country you can fire people pretty much at will, if you’re willing to pay them severance (I don’t think he would qualify for the single exception – you’re employer knowing that you are a pregnant woman).
OK, so there’s some law stopping you from firing him. Is there a law stopping you from revoking his network access and paying him to read the newspaper, from home, while you figure out how to get rid of him?
Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.
Authorities have searched Childs’ home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.
Like.. a computer? Thank god they couldn’t find such a specialized tool anywhere.
Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.
Heh. So you not only keep him on board, but pay him extra because the stability of your system depends on this employee you don’t trust anymore.
Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.
The most basic rule when firing people with access to your organization’s brain is that you fire them on the spot – even if you have to pay them extra to do so. Failing to fire someone and then keeping him with the exact same access rights is just plain stupid, and now San Francisco will pay through the nose for it.
As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.
Of course. Such network sniffing tools are readily available, and are at their most usable when in the hands of a person with network-wide access. Like Mr. Childs here.
If the city employees had used something as simple as Skype or Pidgin with OTR, it would probably have been harder for him to track them, forcing him to install a key logger or using some more invasive methods that could have been detected earlier. But of course, only criminals could possibly see some use in encryption.
Ricardo Freedom, Science and Technology