"It all comes down to access and enforcement of the policy and alerting and containment," Traverse said. "If they had containment and alerting, he wouldn't have gotten to where he got, and if he did, it would have said 'Oops!' and alerted his bosses."

Childs, described as very adept in the Chronicle reports, was a go-to guy for all kinds of problems and thus had a great deal of access. Splunk's Marty wonders if anyone else in the city department even knew what was going on.

"It seemed to me that they don't have the slightest idea what is happening on their networks -- they don't know how to go about cleaning things up," he said. "And it scares me a little because it seems the information on that network seems to be fairly important."

Marty added that if another user can get physical access to a network infrastructure, it is possible to safely reset systems and services.

But he adds the city doesn't seem to know which systems are impacted, making this task difficult.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), which provided the networking infrastructure, declined to comment on the story beyond acknowledging that it is working with the city to restore its access.

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Even after other network administrators get access to the network, Gartner's Litan noted the systems will need a complete rebuild because there's no way of knowing what booby traps Childs may have left behind.

"Even if they get the password, they can't use the systems as they are," she said. "They are going to have to rebuild those from scratch because who knows what he left behind, and that can get really, really expensive."

The city is doing just that, Vinson said. "Our major concern is making sure that we have everything under control, keeping the system fully functional and operable," he said.

The City will also continue to look into improving its internal security practices. " I think as part of our ongoing efforts to beef up our security, this is something we will look at," he added. "We will look at best practices as relates to the network and monitoring the network. We have embarked with outside vendors on a vulnerability study and are looking at an architecture study as well."

So far, however, the costs to the City of San Francisco, high-tech capital of the world, seems to have been limited to making it something of a laughingstock -- or a cautionary tale.

But the impact of a similar incident on a public company would have been much more devastating, experts said.

"If it's a public company, your reputation goes down the drain and your stock price will go down," Marty said. "Your executives would be held responsible and could possibly go to jail."

Litan thinks more people than just Childs needs to be held responsible.

"It should be the whole organization," she said, adding that Child has been used as a scapegoat. "He shouldn't be allowed to get away with this," Litan added. "I don't understand how someone could get so much access."

Update adds comments from the city's Department of Technology office.

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