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Terry Childs Denied Motion For Retrial
snydeq writes "The former San Francisco network administrator who refused to hand over passwords for one of the city's networks has been denied a new trial and is expected to be sentenced Aug. 6. Terry Childs had been due for sentencing Friday but the court instead heard two defense motions, one requesting a new trial and the other for arrested judgment — essentially to have his original conviction overturned. The motions were both denied but the court then ran out of time before the sentencing phase could be conducted."
His job wasn't over at first. He was told that he was being reassigned and should hand over the password. After he refused to do that he was told to create new administrator accounts for the people taking over. It was only after refusing to do that and trying to leave the state that he was arrested and lost his job.
Except if you had done that in this particular case you would of been rebuilding the entire network from the ground up. Terry Childs deleted the startup-config on most of the network equipment so that the only copy was in running-config. He kept the configuration of every device in an encrypted drive on his laptop. If a network device was restarted or power cycled, he would log into the device and copy over the running-config.
Nope. Wasn't his job anymore. Before he was fired he was reassigned to a different job. He was still employed by his job responsibilities no longer included maintaining that equipment. He was introduced to the new person that had that job and asked to give over the passwords. He didn't. It turned out he had booby trapped all the equipment so that only he could make any changes or repair the equipment if it lost power. Still, they were working with him to turn over the passwords to the new guy which he refused to do. The city was setting up another meeting to discuss this even when he decided to withdraw lots of cash and make signals that he was fleeing the country. That's when fed agents decided to arrest him. That's when he was fired. Only then did he say he would turn over the passwords to the mayor when he previously refused to turn them over to anybody because he was playing the "You can't fire me because I have all the passwords." routine a little to hardball. This was not a case of a worried system admin, it was a case of extortion. Perhaps a case of extortion because he is a paranoid nutcase rather than money, but still extortion.
Still, all of that is IIRC. Go back and look at the replies by one of the jurors here on /. who answered everybody's questions about the case and their decision and decide for yourself.
If you're saying that he refused to release a password for a database, then either hire a consultant to forcefully reset the password, or contact the vendor of the software for a solution.
Despite being a jackass with no bus-factor plan, he appears to have sufficient technical capacity to build a system that could not readily be broken into using the methods you suggest. Doing so would have wiped the router configurations (they were not committed to flash, no backups were kept)
The crux of his conviction was based on the fact that he did not grant access to the system when requested by his employer. There are many ways to do that beyond giving up the passwords he used. He could have created new administrative accounts with new passwords. He could have given them access to a console logged in with his credentials.
He thought he could stonewall them. He now has plenty of time to examine the stone walls he built around himself.