San Francisco BOFH must cough up $1.5m

Legendary rogue admin cops hefty damages

San Francisco admin Terry Childs must pay nearly $1.5m for bringing down the city's network for 12 days.

On Tuesday, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Superior Court Judge Teri Jackson ordered Childs to pay the City of San Francisco $1,485,791.

Childs got four years' prison last year for effectively locking city officials out of their own network by refusing to hand over passwords. By the time of sentencing, he'd already been in prison for two years. Lawyers demanded the money as restitution to pay back the council for money spent trying to regain access to their own network.

Childs said at the time that he did not trust officials who demanded access. He finally handed over the phrases to San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom during a prison visit.

At the time of sentencing, San Francisco claimed the downtime had cost the city $900,000. Childs, 46, was arrested in July 2008 for preventing access to the city's FiberWAN network, which carried about 60 per cent of the network traffic for city departments. Childs worked for the city's Department of Technology. ®