Password: The Real Life Version

Password has been an on-again-off-again-on-again TV show for a long time.  It involves, of course, figuring out words from clues given by one contestant to another.  Password has come to mean something else in most workplaces.  It has to do with computers and sometimes an entire computer network.  As San Francisco has recently demonstrated, this version of “password” can be much more exciting.

The city’s IT administrator was arrested and charged with computer tampering after he refused to give over passords to the Cisco Systems switches and routers used on the city’s Fiber WANNetwork.  The city wasn’t completely shut down, but the situation was a bit dicey until San Francisco’s mayor met with the administrator in jail and retrieved the passwords.

According to the administrator, he refused to give the passwords to anyone else because no one else was qualified to have them.  The administrator was surrounded by incompetents who increasingly engaged in mismanagement and negligence, exposing the city to grave danger.  The mayor was the only person he could trust.

This situation came to a head when it was discovered that the administrator had reconfigured several devices on the city’s network that would allow only the administrator to have access to certain information.  Also, no backup configuration files could be found for this information.  The administrator says what he did was critical to the smooth functioning of the network and simply allowed him to remotely access the network in the event of an emergency.

The administrator’s co-workers describe him as well-respected and misunderstood by a management.  They acknowledge that he may have gone overboard under the pressure of working in a department that had been demoralized by significant personnel cuts, but they support him.

There are a few lessons that seem to stand out here.  First, layoffs cause tremendous stress on those left behind.  If someone isn’t paying attention to that, it shouldn’t be surprising when someone goes overboard, even though he may have good intentions.

Next, it should be impossible for a member of the IT department to be the only one who has access to necessary passwords.  It should be impossible for a member of IT to make changes to the network that no one knows about or understands until a standoff occurs like the one in San Francisco.

Finally, whatever happens to the presently jailed IT administrator, his boss should be called on the carpet and perhaps fired.  If the boss is a part of the management that didn’t understand what the IT adminsitrator’s job entailed (which is a fairly common complaint from IT employees) or if he just wasn’t paying enough attention, that’s a major breach of the boss’s duties.  Too often, it’s only the employee who gets in trouble.  What about his boss?