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Disgruntled Engineer Hijacks San Francisco's Computer System
ceswiedler writes "A disgruntled software engineer has hijacked San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar municipal computer system. When the Department of Technology tried to fire him, he disabled all administrative passwords other than his own. He was taken into custody but has so far refused to provide the password, and the department has yet to regain admin access on their own. They're worried that he or an associate might be able to destroy hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, including emails, payroll information, and law enforcement documents."
There was an unsuccessful attempt to fire him. The article also mentions that he was essentially spying on people to learn things being said about him.
It's just not that easy for a sysadmin, especially a major one. For myself, I've got passwords, SSH-keys, and many other access points everywhere in my company. It's not because I want to screw with them, but because they tend to call me at all sorts of different times and I never know if I'll need secure access to the server.
So, routing rules from home. Public SSH keys on various border-servers with my USB-drive having the private keys, etc. They're all used for doing my job, and if I'm fired (not sure why I would be though) I'll just move on to the next one without tainting my career and doing something stupid to burn bridges. However, I could see a *bad* sysadmin using these same tools and more to entrench himself so deeply that you'd almost have to rebuild the entire infrastructure from scratch to find all the back-doors.
If this guy was a real dick (but a clever+smart one), knew it, knew he was going to be canned, and prepared for it... then how are you going to know that your authentication methods, your binaries, or even your kernels haven't been messed with in some way? MD5 sums only go so far when you have hundreds of systems tied together.