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Before You Fire the Company Geek
An anonymous reader writes "A new 'insider threat' survey by the US Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University finds that 82 percent of people who hack their company 'exhibited unusual behavior in the workplace prior to carrying out their activities.' A somewhat amusing writeup at washingtonpost.com points to a bunch of more interesting gems hidden deep in the study, including: 'Almost all - 96 pecent - of the insiders were men, and 30 percent of them had previously been arrested, including arrests for violent offenses (18 percent), alcohol or drug-related offenses (11 percent), and non-financial-fraud related theft offenses (11 percent).' The blog post also notes that 86 percent held technical positions at the companies: '...if you're going to fire someone (particularly company geeks who have the motive, means and access to inflict pain on your computer systems) make double sure you cut off their e-mail and network access at the same time you hand them their walking papers.'
I guess I get it as far as policy goes, but I experienced this a year ago from a large corporation when I got laid off... My manager came to my desk and did the perp walk with me to the office. Told me that in the interest of cutting cough costs the company was willing to offer me a one year severance package and let me go.
I said, "You're offering me a one year severance package???" He looked confused, but said, "yes".
I said, "Well then I respectfully decline your offer.... I would like to continue working for this company."
He said, "It's not optional."
I said, "Then you're not offering anything to me, you are doing something to me."
A couple of notes about the treatment therein:
In my career at this company I had received the highest award given by the company and was flown to a special ceremony to present my project and receive that award.
Bottom line here: you don't have to be a criminal, act like a criminal, or even be suspected of being a criminal to be treated like one....
If you're stupid enough to get caught, you're not earning your reputation anyway.
That's quite coincidental. The company I work for fired a sys admin last week for drug abuse, and we are at this very second combatting a DoS attack from him. He's also using our servers to route spam to all over the place hoping to get our servers listed on spam blacklists so that we can't use corporate mail.
Until they look through their logs...
What will the logs show? That (for instance) an outside hacker used an unpatched exploit on one of your machines to gain access to your network and crack the password to your production server, where they altered or deleted data. This was done from a open wi-fi connection somewhere in your city.
There is NOTHING there that leads back to you. Except why that one machine was left unpatched. But that's hardly conclusive.
Besides, you can just take advantage of 'the system' that you used to have to work under. For example: Let's say you know that your former place of work requires a certain amount of paperwork to be done before patches are rolled out. You can then, 6 months ofter you are (wrongfully) fired, take advantage of that delay to exploit the not-yet-patched machines immediately after the exploit is publically released. No comeback.
There is a difference between Reference and Previous Employment. Essentially when they call your previous Employer all they can ask is "Did they work here?"
When they call your references they can get good or bad information.
And in this day and age, as an employeer, you're liable if you say anything negative about a former employee when another company comes calling. So, unless they have a record with the cops detailing what they did under your employ, they're free and clear.
The best you can do anymore is say "Yeah, Billy Bob Joe Jr. worked here, from xxxx date to yyyy."
It's often called the prosecutor's fallacy. Just google for it.
It involves confusing the odds of A, given B, with the odds of B, given A.
In the US this is not true, at least as a general statement. Under the doctrine of At-will employment you can be fired at any time for (almost) any reason.
It's the "Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent"
Basically, it's whenever you have a one way relation (A->B) and you turn it around to say (B->A), implying that A and B are logically equivalent when it isn't the case.
Good argument, btw.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
um ... we statisticians call this fallacy "confusion of the inverse".
For those clamoring for stats:
m l
..
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.ht
If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17.
An estimated 4,299,000 former prisoners are still alive..By 2010, the number of American residents in prison or with prison experience is expected to jump to 7.7 million, or 3.4 percent of all adults, according to the new report.
And that's probably just people who went to prison; that doesn't include people who were only fined for a felony and/or received a suspended sentence and/or did community service, and perhaps even excludes people who went to jail rather than prison.
Not 1-in-5, but even for white males, uncomfortably close.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Here's a really old chart with real statistics. It says that going to work is way more dangerous than flying in airplanes OR crashing your car.
I occasionally teach sysadmin and related topics. One concept I try to impart is "the finger". It's not the finger that flies like a bird, but the finger that points: if you have root, webmaster, Administrator, DBA, or any other privileged (or otherwise) access to systems, then when something happens, the finger that points eventually swings around to you.
I've left a number of organizations under a number of circumstances. In all cases, I document systems to which I have access, the accounts, and request either passwords be changed or accounts disabled. In some informal arrangements, I've taken the step of removing myself from privileged groups (eg: sudo files) and scrambling my passwords (long random sequences, changed and forgotten).
Where affiliated organizations offered systems access, I'll notify the third party, copied my former manager, that access be denied.
I don't want the shadow of a doubt shading me, and I want to make clear that any and all accesss modifications are the responsibility of the organization.