Do you trust your admins? We hope so.

The case of Terry Childs, the former San Francisco City Systems Administrator, is a good example of why you should be careful — Childs held the network hostage by withholding passwords and setting up a rogue access point. However in the court case, a supposedly expert witness testified that Childs posed no danger because the city could lock him out with simple steps.

Unfortunately, as Ira Winkler at RSA says, it’s not that simple –

…an administrator with a grudge can cause infinitely more damage than a “computer hacker” could ever dream of.

Given that Childs had his job for years, and purposefully kept a wide variety of critical network information from everyone else, it is impossible for them to lock him out of the network with “simple steps”. Of course soon after Tygar [the expert witness] filed his “expert” report, they discovered the rogue access point.

Read the full commentary here.