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3 of 4 Charges Against Terry Childs Dropped
phantomfive writes "Terry Childs, who was arrested nearly a year ago for refusing to turn over the passwords to San Francisco's FiberWAN network, has been cleared of three of the four charges against him. The dropped charges referred to the attachment of modems to the network; the remaining charge is for refusing to turn over the password. The prosecutor has vowed to appeal, to have the charges reinstated. We have the original story, and the story where Childs tells his side, for those who want a refresher."
Always seemed to me this was not much more than a witch hunt. Why else would them set a bail higher than for killers and rapists?
Onda Technology Institute
I'm sorry but this guy has already had time served. Even if they do find him guilty one year in jail for what he did is far more than enough. Plus 1M bail? Is he a violent criminal? ...
This sounds like a classic story if ignorant people making decisions about technical crime and getting scared. I aim that both at the city and at the judge who set the original bail.
We need special technical trials for things like this within which both the defence and prosecution are allowed to bring in technical witnesses to put the case into perspective for non-technical people (as opposed to "HACKER! Get the pitch forks!").
Shocking! The charge that sticks is the only one related to what he actually did wrong! I know the "City of San Francisco" is royally pissed, but even if they're throwing the book at him they have an obligation to stay within the bounds of fact.
I hope he's let off the hook, personally. The damage he's done to his career (who'll hire a DBA who would hijack the whole network?) is probably enough punishment even by itself. And the details of the offense (hostage-taking to avoid a pink slip) are sufficient to keep him from being hired in any field, technical or not.
All he needs is written authorization from the city to turn over the passwords to whoever they say. Any other refusal just makes him a dick and he belongs in jail.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
I opined on the last story that he was playing the 'power game' from the bottom of the political strata. By most accounts he was at the top of the network knowledge, so a technically important guy. 'Network God' doesn't translate into political power and he got burned.
But what else is in the plea deal? I can't help but think there's waaaay more to the story given the political heat this guy brought on himself. Maybe the plea deal keeps him quiet?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Link to an old Slashdot story that then links to an archive page that doesn't even have the word Childs on it.
You have to go to page three of the archive to find the bloody interview!
Why the hell is it so difficult to provide direct links to the actual articles?
I don't have to read the article to know that. If the charges were dropped, the prosecutor would not be vowing to appeal. When a judge gets rid of charges, they're dismissed. When a prosecutor voluntarily gets rid of charges, then they're dropped.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant. Prosecutors are truly the worst part of the system since they are unaccountable to the public and are rewarded for getting convictions, not enforcing the law wisely. As a profession, they are so corrupt that they make civil lawyers look sympathetic since civil lawyers are at least limiting themselves to cases where you can kinda sorta see how their client was genuinely harmed.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
Wrong! The SOP was that he was only to turn the passwords over to the Mayor. This has been covered extensively. This requirement DOES go away if you're fired... you don't [by default] have to turn over ANY passwords! Just say "I don't work here any more, and I don't have your passwords." Meanwhile, if you do still work there, then you're still bound by the agreement you already made to follow the policies and procedures, which means he was bound to turn the passwords only over to the mayor.
In other words, the only charge not dismissed by the judge is the only one which he ever should have been accused of (if any) and he has a solid defense against it. We shall see how it plays out, but it is not nearly as cut and dried as you imagine or pretend.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IIRC, he allegedly changed the Cisco configs but never saved them on NVRAM. You can power-cycle Cisco devices and have a 60-second window to get in without knowing the password That was the big problem.. had he saved the configs to NVRAM, the City could have just power-cycled the devices during a maintenance window, gone in and reset the passwords. But the configs being only in volatile memory meant that if they tried that, the boxes would have lost the config, resulting in the "full system failure"--they City network would have gone down.
What led up to this? This didn't happen for no reason. This wasn't just an ex-con with a temper, nor was it a disgruntled employee wishing revenge. Terry Childs would not have brought this on himself merely for revenge, he's way too smart for that. He was there to protect the network, to keep it running and safe. That must have been a factor.
One of the quoted articles says that the city owned the passwords to the network, so Childs was obligated to provide them on command. The moral of the story is, get your commands in writing and follow the chain of command.
As I recall it was something to do with the routers that if they lost power, they lost configuration - something to make sure if gear was stolen then it didnt come up with any of the secure networks details.
From memory someone viewed this as him setting up some sort of timebomb instead of being good security practices, and charged him as such.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
The article doesn't specify what the actual remaining charge is, only that it's about not revealing the network passwords.
Can someone explain how not revealing a password is actually illegal? Contempt of court?
AccountKiller
So announcing it at a meeting was right out.
The person that should have taken this all into hand and resulted in a normal dismissal instead of an arrest is Chris Vein. He was originally an accountant but many CIOs are and some manage to pick up management skills and familiarity with technology along the way.
Here is what http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4692 says about him:
It's still possible he got there by merit, but it starting to look like a political appointment. On his linkedin page he describes himself as "Delivering strong and effective leadership", which often means someone that fires people for no good reason to show they are "strong" but maybe I've just seen too many bastards in action that like that word. These things may give an insight or maybe not, but the end result of getting the police involved in a workplace dispute demonstrates to me that he is not paticularly effective, let alone the situation where there was only one person that could do the job. BTW San Francisco, do you have your free WiFi from 2006 yet? If not you now know the name of the guy that was in charge of delivering it.
From http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-vein/7/110/71b you can see that Chris Vein was a senior advisor at the White House after only three years in the workforce! I do not think such a rise is possible by merit or desirable in an honest government.
I hope this case looks deeply at the motivations behind getting the police involved. I'm also extremely curious as to what the $1million that has to be spent to repair the "damage" is required for and hope the defence and judge push hard for an explanation of this unusual claim
The defense made a motion challenging the evidence and the judge agreed that there was not sufficient evidence to support 3 of the 4 charges. There was no plea here. The court threw out the state's allegations for lack of evidence. There was no evidence because what he did was probably not sufficient as a matter of law (a matter of fact would probably have been decided by a jury). The charges were merely trumped up. Fabricated. Lies.
And yet they still kept this man in jail for a year awaiting trial for a ridiculous amount of bail money for a non-violent crime.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
Wrong! The SOP was that he was only to turn the passwords over to the Mayor. This has been covered extensively. This requirement DOES go away if you're fired... you don't [by default] have to turn over ANY passwords! Just say "I don't work here any more, and I don't have your passwords." Meanwhile, if you do still work there, then you're still bound by the agreement you already made to follow the policies and procedures, which means he was bound to turn the passwords only over to the mayor. I'll give passwords to anybody who can produce written authorization from any executive, officer or elected official with the authority to do so.
"SOP" is completely meaningless unless it's law or a written policy authorized by the City, that the employee signed.
If the Mayor wants the passwords, that's fine with me. In fact, assuming it was just a few logins, I'd even give it to him for free, regardless of whetehr I was still an employee or not. In fact, if they want to pay for my services, I'll happily root all their servers and routers and tell them what the new passwords are.
. OTOH, I guess that explains why I'm not in jail and have more business than I can handle. The first rule of successfully working with others is "Don't be an asshole."
Cisco passwords are trivial if you have physical access to the device. It's been a couple of years since I've done it, so I'm not sure if you lose the configuration using the methods I know. But if in doubt, try it on one device at a time. One of the links mentions how he gave up the password they wanted, and they promptly screwed it up. Do none of SF "network analysts" know how to backup stuff? Even using crude methods?
some of the routers where in a place with little security and that is where you may want to use that config.
for sys/net admins is to keep in the back of your mind that your actions can be scrutinized somewhere down the line, even if you are the most conscientious, morally upright employee.
If you work in an environment where you are the key technical resource, and others don't have the chops to safely manage the systems you designed/built, you still need to be sure that you put mechanisms in place to track access first, and then you need to provide equivalent access as agreed with management, to other administrators. Since you have the tracking mechanisms there, you can unravel who did what if there is an issue.
I know that it's hard to do this if you work in a hostile environment, or one where people are defensive about their jobs. This is especially true if you are the lead or only techie with the skillset to safely operate in the environment. But without being too paranoid about it, try to inform management as to what you're doing occassionally, track access of yourself & others (if you exclude yourself by using other means of authentication or access, you won't have a leg to stand on, since your actions weren't logged and you could have 'hidden' them).
Try to foster a trust environment with your peers, help them along in becoming competent while giving them access appropriate to their skillset (but make sure others know they are accountable for their actions), and you would improve your chances at exonerating yourself if the PHB's ever start pointing the accusing finger at you.
That's the one thing that confuses me. He still hasn't turned over any passwords, right? Why not?
Bullshit. A skilled system administrator can get root / Administrator access so long as they have access to the machine, so the benefits of giving the password up are far outweighed by the benefits of following industry standard security practices. All too often incompetent upper management needs to be protected from it's own incompetence. You can't make it my job to keep a system running smoothly and simultaneously let any incompetent idiot have root access to it. You can write me a note for the teacher all day, I'm not going to accept it. I'm going to explain to them that they can have the passwords in exactly one manner, and that is concurrent to my resignation. If they want them that bad, they get both. That is where Childs went wrong, but he may well have had the best of intentions.
All of that being said, jail for this guy is absurd, as anyone who actually reads the article and reads Childs' explanation would almost necessarily conclude the same.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm not sure how him being in jail is any different from being held hostage. They're waiting on a ransom. If I went around and changed all the server passwords at work, I think they would have to not only prove it was me, but also that I was being malicious before I'd spend that much time in jail. I'd probably just get fired for being a lousy employee before it got this far. MPO is that the City of SanFran should be responsible for hiring someone to fulfill their duties. It sounds like they did to me, but he's being held against his will because of it. If they had a problem with him, they should have fired him and moved on. Another issue I have is him being held over a password. Other than the obvious, what's the difference between that password and his own gmail password? Is this leading up to some sort of password ownership? COSF is the government. While they may have no interest in someone's WoW password, this sounds like it's going in the wrong direction to me.
So, by that logic if I horde a bunch of my company's hardware and get fired for it, I don't have to return it since I'm no longer an employee? Your argument is flawed.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
No, because that's stealing.
Written authorization from the city? Does this mean that some idiot department manager in the sanitation department should be able to write up some letter, hand it to him, and get the passwords? I doubt it, but that would still be fulfilling what you wrote. At a minimum, it would have to be someone in his chain of command, and if the SOP at the time was to only turn them over to the mayor, then he would almost certainly be legally liable even if he turned them over to say the DA. While IANAL, I have in the past been the owner of those "golden passwords" and had very through lawyers advise me of this in the past when I have left previous employers, and any lawyers he speaks to are no doubt advising him of the same. He cannot be expected to know changes in policy, and if the DA (who may or may not be elected in SFO) or some city councilman was not in that group before... well...
I will say this... First, if all it takes is the mayor asking for them and receiving them, then at a minimum the mayor is being something I cannot say politely here, if not perhaps negligent., if that is all it took to regain control of the network. And secondly, having worked at places such as CompuServe (which carried high security DOD traffic over our network when I was there), if there was not a policy of putting critical (non-personal) passwords in a sealed and clearly labeled envelope, which was locked in a secure safe (such as the mayor's office), then someone was at least a fool. We called this the "incase you are hit by a bus" envelope, because sometimes, folks are hit by a bus or BART train. Crap happens, and if I had been such a person and they had needed one of my golden passwords which only I knew... well, they could get it. And each time I changed it, I put the new one into sealed envelope, put what the password was for (e.g. "Kerberos Server"), along with my name, date, and who could access it (e.g. "CEO, President, EVP of Operations") and took a trip upstairs to put it in the corporate admin's safe. And the old envelope was retrieved, verified to be secure, and shredded.
Helping build UN*X and the Internet since 1981.
You failed to realize that in fact he stated that he would give the passwords to the mayor, which he did.
It appears that Terry Childs is being made the scapegoat of bad policies and procedures. The correct thing to do is to fire those who made the policies and procedures, and learn from those mistakes.
In fact, since humans make mistakes, merely require them to give a public apology. Those who've made prior mistakes are often more careful than those who've made none.
Table-ized A.I.
Bottom line: that is NOT good security practice. Show me one citation where this is recommended.
http://searchnetworkingchannel.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid100_gci1334133,00.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps274/products_configuration_example09186a00801d8113.shtml
i did not know about this case so i went up looking back to all the story and trying to figure out what happened i've runned across these two that explain a bit http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/why-san-franciscos-network-admin-went-rogue-286?page=0,0 http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/childs-attempt-protect-network-password-gone-awry-978 What i'm now missing is what were his duties in the contract and who he had to provide those passwords. this document http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/dtis/coit/Policies_Forms/CCISDA_security.pdf cited in some post here is only about personal passwords and not system ones. So a sysadmin keeps an eye on security, he's asked by his boss in front of unauthorized people to reveal those passwords, in a improvised meeting in a place outside the place where he works. he refuse to say those passwords, he's suspended for unsubordination and some days later he's arrested, and he's still in prison He can only be guilt of being an asshole or too paranoid but since he was the only one responsible for the whole SF Wan who wouldn't have been ? you really would have give away your passwords knowing that if the day after the network would have been down it would have been your only responsability ? - "B....bbbut i gave the password to my boss!" - "Nice work! now you are fired and you'll be charged for the problem you caused with your inefficency" no really.. this story is crazy i really hope he will be released soon but then what about his lost job ? what about the loss in credibility he has to suffer due to ignorance of news that portrayed him as digital version of bin laden ?
Really the classic bit of this story is how the prosecutors included a list of usernames and passwords in their court filing which couldn't have been a better home-run for the defense in terms of 'See what happens when you give the passwords out to these idiots?'.
A year of his life gone though.. This should be a cautionary tale for any IT person.. When things get so bad that you're angry and not making good decisions.. just quit. Find somewhere else, relax. A job at burger king is better than going to prison.
You do realize that SF has to get Childs on something don't you. Otherwise Childs could sue SF farther into bankruptcy than the entire state of CA currently is for wrongful prosecution, imprisonment, etc. Not to mention possible criminal prosecution for the SF officials involved if they lose. This whole thing smells.
See, this is where knowledge transfer is different from holding onto hardware. Or do you think my boss owns the stuff in my head?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
In fact, assuming it was just a few logins, I'd even give it to him for free, regardless of whetehr I was still an employee or not.
I'll tell you what... Whoever replaced you (in this situation) should be fired immediately if any of the passwords you knew still worked.
I know for a fact that any access I had in each of the last two jobs was eliminated upon my release (one I left a job to take the second, and the second was a recent lay-off). It isn't necessarily a case where I wasn't trusted, but simply one where no self-respecting SysAdmin is going to intentionally leave access open to former employees without a good reason.
In fact, if they want to pay for my services, I'll happily root all their servers and routers and tell them what the new passwords are.
THIS is an entirely different problem. :D
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
misleading title...as the charges weren't "dropped," they were dismissed by the Judge (yes...I rtfa).
"Dropped" implies that the prosecutor did the "dropping," either due to a plea bargain or because the lack of evidence.
plus I don't like how the Examiner "labels" Childs as a hacker....he was the f*cking sysadmin and essentially the father/protector of the city's fiberWAN.
Especially considering the incompetence with computers and network security policies and practices by other city workers, he was considered the messiah/scapegoat.
(definitely, among those of us who have had to deal with the city govt)
there are plenty of other fish that the prosecutor(s) can fry that are worth the frying.
oh, btw, I can't get the triangle button to add a tag to work anymore.
To start with normally crimes involve doing something wrong not in failing to do something right. Secondly if the man was fired and then asked to hand over a password he has no obligation at all to his former employer. If he was asked to reveal his password before he was fired and failed to do so then the remedy is to fire him and perhaps to sue him in a civil court. The fact that his failure to reveal his password was expensive to others is irrelevant. This man should sue for false arrest.
Well, you don't have to turn the equipment over because of employment, you have to turn it over because your (now former) employer is the rightful owner.
Before they fired him, he was bound by policy NOT to give the password to his boss or co-workers. After he was fired, he wasn't even bound to remember the password at all much less tell someone what it was.
Personally when I leave an engagement where I had passwords, I delete personal accounts and if I was the only person with a role account password, change it to unmemorable junk, write it down, and seal it in an envelope (then forget it). That goes to whoever the policy says should have it ONLY. If others already legitimately have the role passwords I tell them to change it IN WRITING.
If they choose not to have an appropriate transitional arrangement for that to happen, that's it, I'm gone, good luck to ya! I don't remember a thing!
He indicated willingness to give the password to the mayor. Once the mayor could be bothered to get said password from him, he did just that. Too bad they made a big stink of it such that that step took place while he was in jail. As for the claims of millions in damage to "repair" the network, that seems rather unlikely unless they really were the bumbling id10ts Childs makes them out to be. Even then, that's not HIS doing.
what if you disable the password reset feature on the box? Then all you can do is reset the device to factory and start plugging in config from there.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The thing I don't get is how refusing to give away the password is a crime. Even if he was wrong to refuse to give it away when asked (which is unclear), that would be grounds for dismissal and a civil suit to obtain the password and/or damages, but I fail to see what criminal offence he might have committed. None of the articles that I have seen explain this. Anybody know what exactly the remaining charge is?
that was the point... if anybody can grab the password, then if they have the hardware, they can add new network nodes wherever they want. City offices are stolen from all the time, it was a reasonable precaution for the overly paranoid admin to take rather than having to chase down passwords all the time. This is why he had all the VPN routers set up with a modem connection to his office!
He had the configs saved off site at a secure location and recoverable via modem, as many have mentioned. The fact that you don't think the possibility of theft is higher than the possibility of a power outage doesn't mean that's unlikely. I have a router that's been on for over 5 years without power loss, even though the building has lost power multiple times. Its also not been stolen, but I think the security guards and multiple doors with different keys help with that.
In his particular case he knew that some equipment would be in places where they could be stolen much easier than a secure room with guards. So he implemented a system that guaranteed no information could be stolen. His priority was security not convenience. On the convenience side he had a system in place that could quickly bring the device back online. As a bonus it also means that a totally different device, such as a new one after a failure, could be brought online almost as fast. So just because your willing to accept a lower level of security doesn't mean he did. If I had you and him vying for the same job to secure a network, I'd hire him in a heartbeat if I could trace your anon post back to you.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
You posted links to the password recovery process, which the GP also posted. I asked for citation showing not saving the config to memory being good security practice. Still waiting...
The issue is what exactly was done where in what situation. I've seen the claim that he removed configurations to only allow the running config to remain active (as you're questioning). And I've seen it stated that he used "no service password-recovery" on other devices. I wouldn't find it at all out of line to use the former if the later wasn't available. They both will provide the same essential level of security - protecting credentials and configuration from physical access.
Perhaps I should have added some explanation for my links. I am specifically interested in the "no service password-recovery" command. From the first link:
Although the ability to perform this type of password recovery often proves useful to administrators, if the router's physical security cannot be guaranteed, this feature opens a vulnerability for attackers. To mitigate this threat, an administrator can disable the password recovery feature by issuing the no service password-recovery command in global configuration mode. After entering this command, the administrator is cautioned not to execute this command without another plan for password recovery, because ROMMON will no longer be accessible.
The Cisco link provides a tad bit more info on what it does. The command is also noted in Cisco's own guide to hardening IOS devices:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk648/tk361/technologies_tech_note09186a0080120f48.shtml
Unless he has proof that the City that asks him to turn over the passwords happens to have been compromised, and he has proof, and in this case he asked to hand over the passwords directly to the mayor...which once he was visited by him in jail, did turn over the passwords.
He felt he had a moral obligation to keep the people of SF safe from whatever he discovered was happening. Should you find out that someone on your network have figured out how to hack everybody's computer and that the only person you trusted to tell about this was the president of your company, but waiting to tell him before actually telling your closes supervisor gets you in trouble, which do you do....?
I think he did the right thing, too many people try to tell themselves that it's not their place to help security
or get involved, such as walking by someone getting mugged...god forbid anyone try to help the guy getting mugged! But we live in a world where people make themselves feel better about their mediocraty by saying
stupid sh*t like he probably deserved it, or is must be a d*ck >: (
Google DoD Router Security practices. This is standard SOP in high security networks to not save the Config in NVRAM. As the highest level of Cisco Certification, CCIE, Terry would be very aware of this practice.
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
Clearly Terry Childs does not belong in jail. Maybe what happened is that San Francisco's mismanagement finally realized that having only one person with access to so critical a network was intolerable. But then, instead of discussing a way forward, it began with a secret investigation, as if Childs was a criminal, and the situation escalated from there, with both sides handling it badly. There are enough cases like this, of sysadmins and security experts charged with hacking for doing their jobs after a dispute with management, that professional education should include a section on how to stay out of trouble. Either that, or add hazardous-duty pay if jail is an unavoidable risk of this work.
-- John S. James www.RepliCounts.org
Of course, the legality is important to the charges, but let's be honest, Childs could have avoided the whole thing by just handing the passwords over to any one of his legitimate superiors in the department. If he was concerned that they were going to fuck things up and frame him for it, he should have transferred the password in writing via some sort of certified method.
Yes, he may win, and yes, his superiors are probably complete idiots. I have yet to see why that was his problem. Now, whether or not he wins, people are going to know that he's the guy who wanted to administer the ramrod to his superiors publicly when he was terminated. Given the general incompetence of government IT departments, I don't think it was worth his reputation and possible hiring prospects (and JAIL time) for him to make this statement. If anything, it shows that he's someone who is willing to go that far to make some sort of point.
For my part, I don't want someone working for me who has the demonstrated capability to endure jail time just to rub me the wrong way because he didn't like how I conducted my department. As a boss, I am accountable to my superiors or the shareholders for my work, not to him. If giving me the passwords to the routers and servers meant that the servers would have fallen apart afterwards, that's no longer his problem, it's his bosses'. And it would have probably make a better point for the city's network to fail after his departure rather than give those moron superiors cover by clouding up the issue of their own incompetence. The best way for prove incompetence is to allow those accused to demonstrate it.
How do you know he is not a member of any of these categories?