A disgruntled San Fransisco employee changed all passwords required to access Wide Area Network (WAN) after he learned about his attempted dismissal.
The engineer, Terry Childs has been arrested and charged with four counts of computer tampering.
Network administrators in San Francisco have been unable to access the city’s new WAN ever since Childs changed passwords which he has refused to disclose.
Computer engineers are trying to crack his credentials and hope to regain access to the systems where emails, payroll files, law enforcement documents and arrest records are stored.
According to Raj Rajamani, product manager at Solidcore Systems, provider of change control solutions:
With modern forensic tools, they will probably be able to crack the passwords he set up, but it may never be possible to know what kind of damage has been done.
The systems affected continue to work, though with only limited or no access but the incident may translate into millions of dollars.
Jeff Nielsen, senior product manager at identity management provider Symark Software said:
They are probably OK until some minor problem arises, such as a hard disk filling up or a tape backup failing. Such problems are normally handled by system administrators easily, but if they’re locked out, they’ve got big problems.
0 responses so far
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.