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Sys-Admins Reading the Bosses Mail?
PetManimal writes "Computerworld has an article about IT staff who have access to corner-office email. Systems administrators, database administrators, storage administrators and higher level IT super users are the types who may access sensitive executive information; one source quoted in the article says that in a company with 1,500 employees, there might typically be five to 10 administrators who have this access. As for how many abuse these priviledges, it's hard to tell, but rogue admins out for workplace revenge or personal gain can wreak havoc: '... Experts agree that the severity of these occurrences generally makes them more harmful than external attacks. One of the biggest obstacles to eliminating unauthorized access is determining how many people have it. Access lists are particularly difficult to formulate in both mature companies, where the number and power of administrators have expanded over periods of years, and small companies, where rapid growth leads to undocumented tangles of administrators who are able to maintain their access because nobody has time to assess their status.'"
A friend in the Government once told me that after the Pollard spy scandal the Government rethought the way it handled clearances. So now there is a discreet pool of clearances. There's no reason why a company, new, mature, huge, or small shouldn't be able to institute a similar policy in terms of access.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Would you be upset if your alergist (doctor) had access to your blood work? No. It is his job. Trust is a huge component of system administration, and any company, or corporation, who doesn't understand that the administrator has the keys to the system, needs to take a better look at their corporate layout.
Admins have access to everything. Or at least they should have access to virtually everything. Because who would you call if it was broken? certainly not the corner office.
Trust is necessary. You have to trust your admins. And if you have an admin that leaves under suspicious or grievious circumstances, you protect your corporations ass with a dismissal agreement.
If you don't have a chain of trust in your IT department you're fucked... even if you do spend bank on "secure internal IT infrastructure."
The rest of the article is all over the place. There's some mention of rogue admins reading executive e-mail rolled into boilerplate security talk about how X% of security risks are insider threats, and then it finishes up with a vaguely related sales pitch for RSA products, owned by... yep, EMC. The guys providing ComputerWorld with ad revenue on that sidebar.
Hopefully those scared VPs will hire consultants and purchase EMC products to "secure" their infrastructure from "rogue admins" who are probably reading their e-mail RIGHT NOW.
There are, after all, fairly straightforward ways to secure data against the admins (assuming they don't actually install spyware, which is a separate subject.) There are also ways to arrange secure key recovery so that the records can be recovered if Something Happens to the exec, but no one person can do it (say, three board members and an outside law firm.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If you do not trust your staff, you have other problems.
In my consulting work I have worked with systems containing sensitive information. Outside the workplace and outside the context of my particular role the information was of no interest to me.
Also, maybe access but _logged_ access. And then a process where someone views the logs to look for unauthorized browsing.
The DMV does it (every once in a while some bozo is fired from the state DMV for looking up minor celebrities information), I am sure many other less involved database systems can too.
At least in small business, and probably in all business, it is completely necessary for upper IT staff to have complete access to everything. I've lost count of how many times upper level management has come to me with the 'I forgot my password, can you get my stuff back?' request. This is a normal occurrence. If we take away the privileges of IT to access upper management data, then upper management is very likely to lose that data.
As an anecdote, one of my customers (I am an IT consultant) lost the password to the video surveillance system. They immediately came to me, and were shocked and annoyed when I said 'Sorry, I wasn't involved in the installation of that system and was never informed of the passwords.' In the end, we found that a user had written down the password at one point and were able to get back in that way!
The point really should be that companies better find upper IT staff that they can TRUST! If they can't trust their IT staff, they have big problems.
There are ways to run a business that limit the amount of information that has to be classified so that it can be relayed verbally or by sneakernet. Like not defrauding your workers or business associates is a good start, followed by not raking in huge undeserved stock options and bonuses, not downsizing and outsourcing just because it is the latest fad, and in general being competent to the point that the only people who care what's in your email are the rarer criminal element and not every damn single employee.
Ahh, driftnet on the switch monitor port. Never has there been such an artistically odd juxtaposition of shoes, porn, corporate logos, and vacation photos.
Someone had to do it.
Public key encryption, duh. Then, even if your admins had this access, which they must in some cases, they couldn't read the message anyway. The sooner CEOs catch on, the sooner everyone else will also.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
but the title is still insightful. This is old news. At work, I'm a domain admin. I have unrestricted access to all the files on tends of thousands of workstations. And to countless shares on hundreds of servers, with lots of infos and documents. And several Exchange servers. And many large databases. Webservers too. You name it, I can access it, totally unrestricted. I have access to tape backup libs. I can read the CEO's mail and documents no problem. I could install keyloggers or anywhere or do packet sniffing or such.
But, well paid employees in a job that doesn't suck aren't typically motivated to do immoral stuff. I get paid well, I'm respected, my hours are decent, etc. I have no reason to be disgruntled and do bad stuff. On the other hand, I can say I'm a fairly ethical person (saying otherwise would be false modesty). The idea is to have good employees, and keep them happy.
Now, if I was some guy paid below what I deserve, in a high stress job that sucks, risking to be outsourced and all, with management making every second of your life miserable and such, poor workplace politics and the old backstabbing between co-workers, then yeah, I wouldn't be surprised when something bad happens... It's old news, disgruntled ppl will sometimes do that kind of stuff.
Let me think, when all this email started getting popular in the mid 1990's wasn't the advice to treat it as postcard....
ie it could be read during transmission buy the post-office worker (sys-admin)....
just a gentle reminder.
I too have seen many knee-jerk reactions by management to any number of real or perceived problems.
Think about it. A group of highly paid MBAs sit in a room and come up with an IT solution you are supposed to implement.
It really doesn't matter whether or not their solution is workable. You MUST embrace it.
If you do not embrace it, you will always be remembered as the "difficult one".
And really, the stupider the idea is, the faster it will go away and be forgotten. It is kind of like evolution, good ideas live and bad ideas die.
In the end, the managers will not remember the solution, or the problem. All they will remember is whether or not you were a "team player" or the "difficult one". Just always agree and do your best to implement. When it dies, let it die quietly. No funeral. No wake. Just let it go.
... followed by not raking in huge undeserved stock options and bonuses ...
While I agree that there have been terrible abuses here, I also recognize that sometimes these options and bonuses are appropriate but that is not always readily apparent. First there is the agent problem. The boss is sometimes merely an agent of the owner(s), how do you make sure he acts in a manner that improves the owners situation rather than his own? Options are one way. This also works up and down the ranks, for bosses and workers. The other area where a big seemingly undeserved bonus is appropriate is for the founder(s) who lost interest/investment income by spending his/her saving to start a business, lost salary income as he/she worked for no salary or a partial salary in the early days of the business, who risked their financially security and reputation to pursing a dream, etc. If they get a couple of big bonuses to repay and compensate for the preceding once the company becomes established, IMHO that is fair. I've seen small companies get bought out, and I've seen employees complain that they got a far smaller bonus than the founder they worked side by side with. What these employees failed to realize is that they took little risk, and that their boss made personal sacrifices so that their payroll checks were there on schedule.
Is the above a typical scenario? I have no idea, but I have seen it a couple of times. I believe it happens often enough to warrant mentioning among the stream of expected "bosses are evil and all profit should go to those doing the work" follow ups. Like many topics, things are far more complicated than they seem.