Locked out of their own network!

Whatever money the city of San Francisco saved by setting up a wide area network (called Fibre WAN) over three years ago just may have to be used to pay for repairing it. It's not that the network failed to function, but rather it has been tampered with.

I read Robert McMillan's article, "IT Admin Locks up San Francisco's Network," and learned that the accused culprit in the tampering is a disgruntled network administrator who works for the city's Department of Telecommunication. So far the network is still running - a good thing as it handles around sixty percent of the city's government network traffic, including IT operations, the e-mail system and the 311 call center. The problem is that passwords were reset so that administrators are now unable to access the switches and routers needed to make system hardware configuration changes.

I've heard of the dangers that disgruntled former employees can pose, but in this case, the administrator, Terry Childs, is still employed by the city. Why he'd jeopardize his position is a mystery to me. It does seem that someone dropped the ball and/or cut corners somewhere, because there's no excuse for the security lapse(s) that had to have occurred in order for Childs to be able change the system to effectively lock-out other administrators. I have to agree with nCircle's security operations director Andrew Storms when he said, "Some safety nets and best practices were probably overlooked if one person could have caused this much damage."