Fear the IT Technician

[klytus.livejournal.com]

Somebody finally did what every IT tech in the business has long dreamt of doing, but never had the balls to do...

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/148427

Comments

[superbus.livejournal.com]

There's also a profile of five others (http://blogs.zdnet.com/careers/?p=127) that essentially did the same thing over at ZDNet.

[imaginatrix.livejournal.com]

Wow...

What. BALLS.

[forge.livejournal.com]

BWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[bitterfun.livejournal.com]

meh. I hope this guy gets put away. While the BOFH Admin is a chuckle, a real BOFH is asshole that funnels all the work through his/her maniacal powermongering and then stresses that they have too much work.

There are two type of SAs out there:
The guy that does a kick ass job, takes pride in his good work and makes a semi-autonomous system/network.
The IT Asshole that makes it so no one can get anything accomlished without his fucking authority/permission.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Yes, sometimes we dream, but why blow our chances of ever working in the field again?

IMO, the best revenge is getting a better paying job after working for a turkey.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

I never said I thought this was a *good* thing, because it ain't. Still, I gotta give credit where credit is due for having the industrial sized pair of cojones to actually go through with something like this.

[spiker-uk.livejournal.com]

Ballsy, aye, but stupid to the point of being *incredibly* dumb.

This, overall, is FAIL.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Have to wonder how much time and energy it took to rig the system so it wouldn't let him be fired, and would then poison-pill the admin access when they tried (or when he manually triggered the poison-pill code later on, by whatever means), and how much more good he could have done if he weren't putting so much time and energy into looking over his shoulder. Sorry, the guy sounds paranoid, territorial, and controlling .. I've worked with people like this in other fields who have to be the only one in the department with any real picture of what's going on, and put themselves in the center of every possible flow of information to be able to control who knows what, and they're truly tiresome to deal with. And I have yet to see anyone run an organization that way and actually bring any benefit to it. It sounds to me like there was a lot more going on with this guy than just a simple beef with the higher levels of the administration.

But it may just be my anarchic nature and my inborn hostility to "little kings" .. your mileage may vary.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

There's a fine line between genius and madness.

The sad moral to this story is that as much of an inconvenience this guy has created, that's all it is. They'll eventually fix it, and he's gonna be spending a looooong time behind bars or perhaps worse. Hope he enjoys his Mitnik-like exile.

"Whatdya mean I can't even own a calculator?!?!?"
"Sorry, risk to national security. Here's an abacus."
"MOTHER-^@%#%@%#!!!!!"

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

P.S. Best example I've ever seen of the maxim that "Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean you *should*."

Just saying ..

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

Exactly and thank you!

This makes people even more paranoid about what we do, can do, allowed to do etc. SOX compliance be damned, this enables them to create more security and controls that we have to work around to go our job. Perhaps I am just working in companies that are too large and to sectioned out and no one wants you to be able to do their job, share information and the like. I don't know.

On the flip side, yeah this is really funny lets make a movie out of it! But it really shows the true colors of what some IT geeks are. Overgrown children who do not know how to properly behave in a work place and now more people fear the wrath of the IT professional. I swear if he worked in the post office we would be making jokes about him going postal. But geeks have enough social stigmas to overcome as it is. This just reinforces the assumption we are socially backwards children. *shakes head*

[greeklady.livejournal.com]

Was I the only one that was thinking.... "Cool new IT job open in SF!! I wonder what the job description is?" ??

On the flip side, I love how this article makes it sound like setting up an email notification sounds so cool!

He is also alleged to have installed a tracing system to monitor communications related to his personnel case.

Who here is voting for a bogus account with admin privileges to back door into the system?

[tallanvor.livejournal.com]

Why would we dream of doing that? It doesn't take balls to do that, it takes a complete lack of ethics. That's not something most of us would want to be known for.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Maybe he had a very good reason for sabotaging the network? Ever think that he's doing a patriotic duty by blocking attempts to spy on citizens?

Though, restricting police access to mission crticial systems which could endanger the lives of the thin blue line is a dick move, and he deserves jail time, nay, even manslaughter charges for that.

I hope he gave them this password "Lucious Fox"

[dysan27.livejournal.com]

I see some one went to a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight"

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

mmmm. I make my own fate.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Nah, this was just damn stupid. Sure, the city obviously made some bad decisions (hiring, disaster recovery, auditing), but this has got to be the least successful way of bringing them to the public attention.

All I could think of was "So, even with physical access to the systems, SanFran wasn't back on line in a couple of hours, which means that they not only have no-one vaguely capable working for them, but don't know where to get such a person. Where do I send my extremely expensive repair quote?"