Government Technology - December 2008 - (Page 24)

Some speculated that Childs became too possessive of his work, though that’s not easy to prove or verify. In a July 18 InfoWorld article, Senior Contributing Writer Paul Venezia wrote that “Childs apparently trusted no one but himself with the details of the network” and that administrators who build and maintain large networks often “care for them like children.” But if Childs felt that way, that reason would ultimately have been no excuse, said Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer and deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Technology. “[That] network does not belong to Terry Childs. It belongs to the city and county of San Francisco, and that’s the major point there,” he said. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom How It All Began In July, Childs was charged with felony counts of computer tampering. The network he hijacked was San Francisco’s FiberWAN (wide area network) that handles payroll, e-mail, and law enforcement and jail documentation. Childs was one of five people who worked on the network. “On July 9, in a process to complete our change control and change management system, I requested of Mr. Childs the user [identifications] and passwords for several devices on the FiberWAN network,” said obtained the city’s network passwords by paying a jailhouse visit to the former network engineer who was hoarding control of them. Childs made unauthorized and undocumented changes to the network, Robinson said. “The rest of the network engineering staff would not have the ability to continue to do any change control, any change management or any continued rollout of the FiberWAN,” he said. “That being the case, applications, so you don’t have one person that is godlike and controls all your resources.” Rico Singleton, deputy CIO, New York state “You must have a balance of authority across your security layer, either with the network or Chief Operations Officer Richard Robinson. Childs refused to comply. The devices in question were different types of network routers and switches. According to Vinson, the department had already been implementing network security protocols, and when other network employees observed actions that weren’t best practices, it led to Childs’ questioning. Vinson said San Francisco paid at least $182,000 to Cisco and other contractors to help remedy the problem. DEC_08 it became a criminal issue because he was denying us administrative access to equipment that the city owned.” Robinson contacted the police department, and the officers also asked Childs to provide the passwords, but he still refused. According to the Chronicle, he gave authorities bogus passwords at one point. He was arrested three days later on July 12, Robinson recalled. The Department of Technology started working with Cisco, its network vendor, to handle the network as well as possible in the meantime. Once Childs gave the mayor the codes on July 21, network engineers regained control. But even now, Robinson and his team are still trying to determine the extent of the changes Childs made. “We have found that Mr. Childs had put other devices, unknown to management or other network engineers, within the network and that this is undocumented and unauthorized equipment,” Robinson said. In its August story, The Post reported that Childs set up unauthorized network doorways that allowed him “unfettered and undetectable access.” He obtained pages of user names and passwords and downloaded gigabytes of city data to a personal storage device. At the time, Childs wasn’t the only engineer with control over the network, but his control increased as his co-workers moved to other projects. Childs left many devices inaccessible; he had gone through and encrypted many of them, Robinson said. These devices don’t hinder the department from administering the network, but they do make it harder for personnel to identify and correct problems Childs may have left behind. 24 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2008

Government Technology - December 2008 Contents Point of View Four Questions for... On the Scene Big Picture Year in Review Who Controls Your Network? Paper Makes a Comeback Halting Meth Abuse Spectrum Up Close signal:noise Digital Communities Contents Becoming a Digital Community Rethinking 700 MHz Smart Grids: Powering the Future Gearing Up for Crime 2.0 Software Predicts Crime Local Portals on the Red Carpet More Than Just a Pretty Face

Government Technology - December 2008

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