Debate IT: Could the San Fran network lock-out happen to you?
- 01 August, 2008 10:11
- Comments 1
In mid-June a network administrator with San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication Information Services allegedly locked the city out of the multi-million dollar Fibre WAN used to connect computers in buildings throughout the city, carrying about 60 percent of the networking traffic for the city government.
As administrators struggled to regain control of the city's network, Terry Childs, 43, pleaded not guilty to charges of computer tampering before a San Francisco Superior Court.
(See Computerworld's in-depth features - Why San Francisco's network admin went rogue and Sorting out the facts in the Terry Childs case)
With few details publicly released on exactly how Childs managed to lock the city out of its own network, many are suggesting that the lockout and the city's response to it point to a failure to implement and manage fundamental security controls.
Users and analysts interviewed last week said the city could have avoided the recent turmoil by implementing stronger configuration management techniques along with processes that could quickly detect when someone was attempting to bypass network controls.
As the media circus surrounding the Childs case grew, more and more stories cropped up about networks where one person holds all the "keys to the kingdom" and the subsequent security threat this represents.
What happened in San Francisco can happen in any Australian IT department. So, could the same thing happen to your organisation?
Does one person hold all the keys to your corporate network?
What can enterprise networks do to avoid a repeat of the San Francisco lockout?
Tell us what you think...
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Comments
Andrew Hendry
You reap what you sow
From the small amount that I have read about this guy, it seems like Childs was the one largely responsible for the construction and configuration of San Fran's Fibre WAN and simply didnt trust other engineers with the same level of control as him, "it was his baby" as one story suggests, leading to his lack of trust in anybody else's ability to control/maintain the network - a completely understandable position. Having said that, giving one man the 'keys to the kingdom' as is suggested above seems a little silly in retrospect. But hey, who would expect anything else from government/state officials!? I doubt very much that the corporate networks of large Australian enterprises are in the hands of one sole person, and if it is, well then you reap what you sow.....
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