A computer engineer who allegedly held San Francisco’s computer system hostage was denied a reduction in his $5 million bond Wednesday after the prosecutor said the system had been rigged to melt down during routine maintenance.
Earlier this week, Terry Childs, 43, gave the disputed password to the system to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a jailhouse meeting arranged by his lawyer, The San Francisco Chronicle reported the mayor then gave the password to a team from Cisco Systems which had been working to open up the city’s FiberWAN network.
However, the password did not work initially, prompting the mayor to call Childs for clarification. The Chronicle said Childs then gave the mayor missing protocols to go with the password and the city regained control of its system.
Bond More Than for Murder
Childs has been charged with causing a loss of more than $200,000 and four counts of felony computer tampering. His bond was set at about five times the amount usually set for murder suspects after $11,000 in cash was found on him when he was arrested July 13, leading the district attorney to fear he planned to flee.
Prosecutor Conrad del Rosario told Superior Court Judge Lucy Kelly McCabe that Childs, a five-year veteran of the city’s Technology Department, had put key program data in temporary memory files. They would have evaporated when the network was shut down during maintenance or a power failure. Experts were able to transfer the data to permanent files before a shutdown scheduled for last Saturday.
“He had a malicious intent to destroy the entire network,” del Rosario said, noting that Childs did not give the mayor the password until after the scheduled shutdown. The prosecutor further noted that other systems Childs had access to are still not functioning properly.
He said the sheriff’s department and the parks and…