San Francisco Incident Raises Questions for CIOs

In July 2008 Terry Childs, a network engineer in San Francisco's city-county government, was arrested for seizing control of the fiber network, locking out co-workers and denying officials the passwords to get back in.  Although most of the dust has settled, San Francisco's Department of Information Technology still has a pile of digital debris that it is shifting through. Apparently disgruntled network administrator Terry Childs left a networking device hidden on the city FiberWAN network that, as of this writing, IT staff are still trying to locate -- months following Childs' arrest. 

The ability of Childs to single-handily hold the San Francisco system hostage raises many questions about how to manage operations in complex public and private systems. READ MORE