14 DAY TRIAL // Terry Childs, the former San Francisco computer engineer who held the city's multimillion-dollar network hostage for almost two weeks in 2008, was sentenced to four years in prison late last week. The rogue admin already served 755 days in jail since he was arrested making him eligible for probation in around six months.
The unusual case of Terry Childs and the San Francisco FiberWAN hijack was reported by the media across the world in 2008 when it happened. Upset that his superiors intended to fire him from his position with San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication and Information Services, Childs changed the master password for the entire network that carries much of the city's data on a daily basis.
Called FiberWAN, the network which cost the municipality millions of dollars, was locked down for twelve days because Childs refused to give out the access codes he put in place. The engineer agreed to reveal the password only San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, personally visited him in prison.
The prosecution initially pushed for several charges of computer tampering related to the fact that Childs placed unauthorized tabs on his personnel file, allowing him to see any changes made to it. The judge however threw out those charges and only kept the one related to the prolonged network downtime, which led to loses of around $900,000.
Help Net Security reports that Childs was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday. However, the former admin already spent 755 days in county jail since his arrest, because his bail was set at a staggering $5,000,000, five times more than the usual one for murderers.
According to his attorney, this makes him eligible for parole in about six months. In his defense, Childs explained that he resorted to such actions because he strongly believed that his supervisors were unqualified to manage the city's network, which he helped build.
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