Electronic hostage taking is interesting as it offers a myriad of storylines for books and/or screenplays. Thus the SF Chronicle story of:

computer network administrator … tampered with the city's new FiberWAN … created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system … may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents … engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing

shows the ongoing need for technical oversight of your technical folks. I'll update this blog entry when we find out how this case turned out for the city.