REBECCA DUBE
From Monday's Globe and Mail
July 21, 2008 at 3:30 AM EDT
If the phrase "disgruntled computer engineer" didn't send chills down your spine before, the tale of Terry Childs may change that.
The San Francisco city employee allegedly locked everyone but himself out of the city's computer network and refused to give up the password - even to the police.
The computer network still works, but no one can get into it to make changes or repairs, and no one knows how long it will take to restore access.
Mr. Childs was arrested on July 13 and has been sitting in jail, his bail set at $5-million (U.S.), while city officials frantically try to regain control over the system that controls city e-mails, law-enforcement records and payroll documents.
His lawyer insists it's all a misunderstanding, but San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom says it's a case of a good employee gone bad.
"He was very good at what he did and sometimes that goes to people's heads," Mr. Newsom told reporters, "and we think that's what this is about."
Mr. Childs, hired five years ago, was highly regarded and even helped build the system he is now accused of holding hostage.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Mr. Childs had been disciplined in recent months for poor performance and his supervisors had tried to fire him. Mr. Newsom described him as a "rogue employee that got a bit maniacal."
Maniacal, perhaps, but we all go a little mad sometimes at work. Few of us pull off our revenge in such a spectacular manner as Mr. Childs allegedly did, but still - everyone gets in their little digs at The Man.
"Most of us just steal a few stamps," says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based human resources firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.
"All of us have a love-hate relationship with our employers. Everyone feels they're underpaid, underappreciated, blocked, betrayed in one way or another at times."
Mr. Childs entered a plea of not guilty last Thursday. As his story spread around the globe, reactions included a surprising amount of support.
"Go Terry! Take a stand for all the IT personnel being abused by management in this world - I'm with ya!" wrote one online reader of The Times of London.
"You would not give a toddler the keys to your car, so why should Terry give the passwords to staff or bosses who simply don't know how to manage the configs?" asked one Chronicle reader who claimed to have worked with Mr. Childs.
If nothing else, San Francisco's plight should reinforce a key lesson: Be nice to the people who control your computer networks. Sure, they may look harmless, but that's just their Bruce Banner side. Don't make them angry.
"Many companies don't realize how under the thumb of IT [information technology] they really are," Mr. Challenger says.
Mark Swartz witnessed the wrath of a ticked-off techie at a company he worked for in the 1990s. The sole IT person doled out technical assistance based on her whims, and everyone in the office sucked up accordingly.
"She just kept getting meaner, and they couldn't fire her because she was the only person who knew the system," says Mr. Swartz, who is now a career coach and author based in Toronto.
Low-level, passive-aggressive sabotage at work is common, Mr. Swartz says, and only rarely flares into overt acts of retribution for real or imagined slights.
"The more fed up you are, the more likely you are to do something risky," he says.
Those IT folks are not always angels when they wield the power that comes with having access to a company's computer system. One-third of IT professionals admitted to reading personal e-mails, checking salary details and peeking at other confidential information on their networks, according to a survey released last month by IT security firm Cyber-Ark.
"It happens probably more than we're willing to acknowledge," says Adam Bosnian, a vice-president at Cyber-Ark. Executives worry about hacker attacks from the outside, while the greatest risk to their computer networks may be stewing in the next cubicle.
"The top lesson is: Don't assume you have control over your network."
Revenge of the nerds
Oh, those lovable IT folks. We depend on them to keep our computers running, to retrieve our bacon when we mistakenly delete files, and to ignore embarrassing e-mails. But when techies go bad, things can get ugly: An Australian engineer was sentenced to two years in prison for hacking into a waste-management system and causing millions of litres of raw sewage to be dumped into rivers and parks. Vitek Boden had been rejected for a job by a local agency that had contracted the company he worked for to create the computerized sewage system.
Roger Duronio was found guilty of computer sabotage and securities fraud for writing, planting and disseminating malicious code - known as a "logic bomb" - that took down 2,000 of UBS PaineWebber's servers. Mr. Duronio, who quit UBS PaineWebber after getting a smaller-than-expected bonus, had shorted the company's stock on the day the "bomb" was set to go off.
When Danielle Duann was fired from her job as IT director of the LifeGift donation centre in Houston in 2005, she allegedly deleted records containing organ donor information. She was indicted last month.
Soon after Alan Giang Tran was fired from his job at an airport limousine company, his former employer's network was hacked and the customer database wiped out. When federal investigators searched his home, they found details of the company's computer system in a folder labelled "retaliation." He pleaded guilty.
Topic: alright which one of you is the guy who hijacked this network? (Read 6713 times)