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When Sysadmins Go Bad
An anonymous reader writes "Here is a story about what can happen when you think you're being oh so clever. This sysadmin planted so-called logic bombs on the systems he was responsible for and then quit. He also tried to game the stock market, buying put options on his former company, hoping to cash in when the disaster he engineered struck. Who can companies trust if they're afraid that this kind of thing can happen? How can they prevent it?"
Obviously, in the sake of security, you should NEVER provide system administrators with dangerous tools such as root passwords!
Seriously though, security is a very delicate matter which is entirely built on trust.
Ways to improve security is to limit access to only what you actually need to use. In the case of system administrators and the like, it's not quite as easy as they obviously need a high level of access.
One solution would be to have third party audits of the systems, perhaps with read-only access in order to prevent tampering, but even then you need to trust the integrity and skill of the auditors.
Another thing to remember is to have a solid disaster recovery plan, but that's only good AFTER something happens and the person designing and implementing this plan will likely be the person that has the most access.
There's no universal answer to this problem. If I knew of one, I'd be rich as heck from selling it to companies.
Many years ago one of our staff left at the end of the summer. Our boss said "Thank you very much for working for us ... [pause as the door closed, then turned to a coworker] ... delete his account."
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Have two sysadmins, who work in different areas, and who a la "missle key firing system" both have to approve additions to important code bases.
Obviously, you could get two bad apples and have the same thing happen, but odds are slim.
Problem is, it tough to find ONE good admin, much less two, esp. with tough times for business... having to dole out twice the budget to protect yourself "just in case". Then again, it would double the job market =)
OR mabye CVS everything, and look through all changes an employee made after they quit... then again, the clever get around this, etc.....
*sigh* People just suck sometimes.
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When you have reasonable salaries, reasonable work hours, and no one that runs everything.
First of all you'd have less disgruntled employees.
Second, you'd have less disgruntled employees.
Third, you wouldn't need to trust anyone 100%. Most egos of sysadmins wouldn't let them let someone else compromise their system. If you have 2 or more admins 100% responsible for the integrity of a system, and each performing checks on each other, you would reduce the occurences of these types of attacks.
> Who can companies trust if they're afraid that
> this kind of thing can happen?
Nobody.
> How can they prevent it?
They can't.
Employee misbehavior spans an entire spectrum of seriousness, from stealing paper clips to embezzling billions. You can't prevent a determined and dishonest sysadmin from sabotaging a system any more than you can prevent an accountant from diverting funds or an after-hours custodian from taking things off peoples' desks.
There is no panacea, technological or otherwise.
Preventing employee misbehavior has several parallels with Copy Protection. No affordable and practical scheme is bulletproof if the person is determined enough, so the best method is to remove the motivation. The same rules apply to all employees: treat and compensate people fairly and they will be less likely to want to hurt you.
But even that doesn't work in all cases. If your staff is large enough there will always be people who feel that you are mistreating them, or underpaying them, and who will feel compelled to get what is "rightfully theirs" in other ways, large and small. And many people steal/etc. without regard to the harm it causes the company or other employees; their motivation is purely selfish, so it doesn't matter how well they are treated and paid.
So even if you treat and compensate people fairly, and trust everybody you hire, you must monitor people's activity, investigate suspicious behavior, and, when necessary, prosecute wrongdoers to the fullest extent of the law.
I probably sound cynical, but I speak from experience.
SysAdmin, as the word says, it's the Administrator of the System.
there's no technical way to restrict their actions, or we should restrict the computer's capacity.
people do bad things for money, that's all, how could we prevent this happen? how could we prevent crime? how could we prevent people shoot each other? these are analog.
it's political or human issue. not technical.
Don't keep disgruntled employees or employees that you keep hidden away in a back room and ignore. Management that keeps good relationships with its employees don't have as many problems with this sort of thing.
This means:
1) Help work to keep employees happily employed (not with bribes - with real career paths, personal interest, etc.). If you keep wage-slaves, expect mutiny.
2) Actively replace employees who can't be kept happily employed. Get others who are competent and glad to have the spot (which shouldn't be too hard in this economy). Keeping people around who don't want the position isn't doing them any favors. If no one who would be qualified would also be glad to have the spot, rethink the position.
"Management" should be helping manage situations like this. If this guy had been disgruntled for a long time, it seems to be their fault for keeping him (and keeping him unhappy and ultimately vengeful). Sounds like someone did a bad job at people-management . . . sounds like the type of willfull neglect that is inexcusable but all too common. Many people think that "management" is watching the bottom line -- that is a lazy, oversimplified way of looking at an important job.
yeah, but the difference is, the sysadmin is a criminal, a CEO that's stealing is just unethical...
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>> How can they prevent it?
> They can't.
They can at least reduce the chance a lot with redundency.
If you have a team of sys-admins, you have a good chance that the other might catch the bad one before it's too late. And if they feel treated well by the company and don't share the sentiment of the saboteur, the damage is usually contained.
Another policy I've seen in some banks is that all employees have to take 2 continuous weeks paid vacation each year (the rest of the paid vacation time can be distributed at will). This promotes cross-training and redundancy.
All of this costs money, but think of it as cheap insurance, compared to the cost of rogue sysadmin. Is it worth penny-pinching on salaries and benefits, while maxing out the workload if that results in disgruntled employees who timebomb your systems as they head for a new job?
If you paid the sysadmins $1 million per year, there would be zero theft, zero funny business, and zero turnover. Of course, nobody can do that and stay in business. At some level less than $1 million and higher than fast-food wages, you can retain decent people and discourage malicious tactics. The key to avoiding a technological meltdown is to treat people well enough so that your recruiting process lets you avoid the marginal candidates. Once hired, a properly compensated person should feel as if the "have something to lose", and therefore you can expect such a person to act as a professional. Paying hamburger wages and putting a person in the sysadmin seat would be like staffing a nuclear power plant control room with random selections from the phone book.
This is a very interesting topic, especially right now. We are in a down market, and there is an irresistable temptation for some employers to make lowball offers to currently-unemployed candidates. This allows the employer to cheaply refill vacancies (or exert leverage against current employees). Those employers who are gung-ho about bottom-feeding are setting the stage for big trouble later. Employee turnover is just the tip of the iceberg.