No ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco

San Francisco city officials are currently wrestling with a difficult issue, namely, they cannot access their FiberWAN network after a disgruntled system administrator deleted admin passwords. All administrators are locked out except, for Terry Childs, the unhappy and now ex-employee, who is refusing to divulge his access codes.

He is now facing criminal charges and is due in court tomorrow. However, the stand-off continues, with Childs not prepared to disclose his passwords. Engineers from Cisco have been brought in to try and gain access.  The Mayor of San Francisco has gone to pains to reassure people that the network is working fine: the only issue being if it crashes and there being no way to go into it and fix it.

All very unsatisfactory and embarrassing for the City of San Francisco. It brings into focus the need to be careful as to who has admin rights to your network and the background of people who you give access to. It turns out, that going back, Terry Childs, has a conviction from aggravated burglary.

There is a lesson from all of this for our own home networks. Our research shows that the majority of us use the default names and passwords that come with our routers at home. The bad-guys know all of these default names and passwords. So, if you do not want to have your own version of what is happening in San Francisco, make sure you change your router name and password to something unique to you. Also, be sure to also change the default password on the config/setup for the router as well.

July 17, 2008 | Filed Under Security 

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