A nine-day standoff that left San Francisco’s government computer network prey to an irretrievable crash has ended with a jailed systems administrator handing over the password

As we reported at the time, Terry Childs was put behind bars after altering the system to lock out all other administrators and refusing to tell police the password. Yesterday he finally relented and called the mayor to a private meeting in the city jail where he gave up the details.

That’s not enough to secure his freedom – Childs still faces four felony charges for unlawfully seizing control of the system – but it could count in his favour at a court hearing today in which he’s attempting to get his $5 million bail reduced. The mammoth bail was originally set to reflect the danger he posed if he was able to get online with control of the network.

The meeting between Childs and Mayor Gavin Newson was so secretive that neither the attorney general’s department nor Childs’ employer, the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, were aware of it beforehand.

It seems Childs’ defence will be based on the idea that he acted to protect the network which he had helped create. In a court filing, his lawyers said “His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it … and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves.”

They are also arguing that the monitoring devices which allowed Childs to access the system remotely were there with the knowledge of his superiors and were actually designed to let him deal with emergencies.

However, his alleged offences appear more serious now it’s been revealed that he had configured several government servers such that they’d erase configuration data if anyone attempted to restore access while he held the passwords hostage.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm under Hacking, Legal, Security.

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