Network Admin Sticks it to San Francisco; Now Guest in SF Jail
Did you ever wonder if you were harboring a disgruntled employees with his own V for Vendetta fantasy? The lesson from a story out of San Francisco is that we can't assume disgruntled employees only come from the lower ends of the pay scale.
San Fransisco city officials are now cleaning up a mess created by a network administrator who earned a respectable salary even by above average northern California standards. The San Fransisco Chronicle is reporting a city (or soon to be former) network administrator is in jail on four felony counts. He set up a privileged account to give himself exclusive access to the system and refused to give police the passwords to the account.
All this from someone who was paid $149,269 last year. Money can't buy you love or security from a determined IT professional on the inside.
UPDATE: A reader below comments about the use of monitoring tools on the network. When the story was first reported there were claims that the system admin was monitoring others' communications. It is not clear what, if any monitoring, was done on the network. Perhaps more details will come out in the trail which sheds light on this but until then we can't assume there was any illegal monitoring activity.
Email This!
Digg it!
Sphere it!
Del.icio.us
Reddit!
Newsvine
Comments
No evidence has been shown that he "engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case" nor is he charged with any crime related to such activity. The district attorney indicated in a motion to oppose bail reduction that Childs had a system designed to monitor network traffic but failed to mention that such systems are standard tools for troubleshooting network problems and are regularly used by network administrators around the world.
Posted by: Jeana Pieralde | August 11, 2008 1:46 PM