Print
Terry Childs, who locked down San Francisco's FiberWan system last summer, will get his day in court on January 13, exactly six months since he went into the slammer for allegedly hijacking the network he designed and maintained. $5 million bail stands between Childs and a 'get out of jail' card until trial.
The San Francisco Chronicle website reports:
After an eight-day preliminary hearing, Superior Court Judge Paul Alvarado ruled Wednesday that prosecutors had produced enough evidence of Terry Childs' probable guilt to hold him for trial on four felony charges of tampering with a computer network, denying other authorized users access to the network and causing more than $200,000 in losses.
How much more than $200,000? According to prosecutors, the city claims it spent almost $1.5 million in "attempts to regain control of the network and assess its vulnerability to intrusions."
Childs' attorney claims her client was trying to protect the network from other employees:
Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password. His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it...and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves...He was the only person in that department capable of running that system.
The case made our 250 Most Important Tech Products, Events, and People of 2008 list at number 232. Stay tuned to MaximumPC.com for further updates.
Comments are closed on this article
horzo
December 29, 2008 at 4:51pm
This guy was the senior network admin for the city of SF. He wasn't dealing with end users.
Anyone who's dealt with SF city employees, however, wouldn't have any trouble believing that both his managers and the people he worked with were totally incompetant. Still his fault for completely losing his cool and breaking the law, but I can easily understand what motivated him to do so.
Phated1
December 29, 2008 at 3:32pm
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. And to see if there is really any ground for his counter argument that his coworkers were really the badguys.
But, being that most people that IT guys have to deal with are "duh whats a mouse?", it wouldnt be surprising to see that this really was just a case of him being pissed off at who he had to deal with on a regular basis.
Keep the updates coming!
