It all ended well in the case of the San Francisco FiberWAN network lockout, but the whole situation might have been avoided if better network administration standards would have been implemented, experts say.

Terry Childs, an IT engineer and administrator of the San Francisco FiberWAN network, which supports about 60 percent of the city's state agencies' traffic, locked out the network by creating a set of passwords that made him the only person to be able to restart it if it was ever stopped either for maintenance of due to a power failure. The rogue administrator has been charged on four accounts of felony for what he has done and is held in the county jail until his trial, unless he can pay the exorbitant bail of $5 million that was set for him.

As a result of Childs' actions, nobody was able to log into the network for over a week until the IT engineer decided to hand over the passwords to the city's Mayor, Mr. Gavin Newsom.

While everybody is happy that the situation ended up well, security experts consider it to be an example of what poor administration standards could do to a network. According to them, there could have been several ways of preventing the whole thing. For example, if the city would have kept backups of the network configurations at all times, there is a pretty good chance that they could have been used to set the network to the configuration it had prior to the attack.

How much the San Francisco authorities have learned about network security from this episode is unclear. This week, 150 usernames and passwords have been made public as an exhibit in the suit against Terry Childs. Even though it apparently exists a second password that must be entered as well in order to gain access to the FiberWAN network, the decision poses yet another threat to the already tempered-with city computer network.