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SF Not an Exception In Giving IT Too Much Control
CWmike writes "The city of San Francisco's IT department is certainly not the exception when it comes to allowing just one person to have unfettered rights to make password and configuration changes to networks and enterprise systems. In fact, it's a situation fairly common in many organizations — especially small to medium-size ones, IT managers and others cautioned in the wake of the recent Terry Childs incident."
I really think this type of thing is inevitable with this high level of a network admin. There comes a point where the complexity of the network you manage means that you simply can't report all the inner details and workings to a manager or overseer. Not only that, but with the speed that computers advance, hardware becomes obsolete within a decade, and new talent often times wont have knowledge/capabilities/will to deal with the older hardware that builds up in operations such as these.
Sadly I think the only thing one can do with things this size, is appoint someone and pray he isn't chaotic evil.
I forget who said that "an elephant is a mouse designed by a committee." Sure, you can get paranoid about network design and control, and give the job to a committee. But that is going to be really clumsy.
The issue here really is not about size of the design team, it is about vetting the guy who does it. ( The guy who is in charge of the network for my business is someone who I really know and trust. He was best man at my wedding. )
When you have already laid off everyone and downsized your IT department to so few employees, its kind of hard to avoid having a single person with so much power.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Yes, this is prevalent. Unfortunately, no, it has precious little to do with IT.
This quote from TFA is quite true, but universally so. Let's play Business Mad Libs:
"Single points of failure are always bad," said John Pescatore,
an analyst at Gartner Inc. "There should never be one person who is
the only person who knows ____ MISSION CRITICAL INFORMATION ____."
Companies need to make sure there are at least two if not three people
who share the knowledge of ____ BUSINESS PROCESS______. "As a minimum,
require it to be documented and stored somewhere if personnel
limitations say you can't have personnel with overlap," Pescatore said.
Have fun playing the accounting, regulatory, legal, and R&D versions, just for warm-up.
Now, if the business managers weren't smart enough to either know this applied to IT as well as their other divisions, or not smart enough to not recognize that that they needed outside advice on how to apply business rules to IT - well, you have to wonder how well the other parts of their businesses are running.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Of course there will be people in IT who have power, and of course that power can be abused.
Somebody at a television network has the power to broadcast rocking horse porn if they want to as well and there is no time machine to unrock that horse.
The articles hypes up one person being able to abuse power as if it were unique to IT and suggests a remedy that more than one person should have this power, as if this had any bearing on anything, e.g. the ability for the abuser to simply revoke access to others. What, somebody else should be assigned the exclusive ability to revoke? Then that person is the potential abuser. This is silly.
Apparently, a bunch of idiot managers realized all of a sudden that they had GIVEN one person control over a major network, and tried to seize back control. Also apparently, he did not trust them to keep it running properly. (And also apparently, rightly so.)
So where is the "incident"?? What did he do wrong?
By law he might have done "wrong" by not relinquishing the passwords immediately. But by the people of San Francisco, he may have saved them a lot of trouble and headaches. So, he was faced with a dilemma: obey the law, or do the right thing.
Sad.
The subject of the article is about one central admin having too much control over too many machines, and the risks that entails when they go bad.
Which makes a person wonder... how much worse when billions of consumers are giving total control over all their machines to a centralized authority through Trusted Computing and Vista?
I mean, what happens when Microsoft goes bad?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You call it dangerous, I call it job security.
It's called Seperation of Duties.
Some people on /. think it is best to have one knowledgeable person with all the information so that confidential information is not leaked or changes made without the lead guy being aware.
Others think of the bus rule, what happens if the guy who knows everything about mission critical infrastructure components gets hit by a bus?
That is why I have taken a page from the Sith Lord Darth Bane and apply the rule of two. When I build a network I teach and train one apprentice. Then if they suck I fire them and hire a replacement, but if they are good, when I get bored and decided to move on, I feel confident they can take on a apprentice themselves.
It is neat, clean and simple, better still it doesn't have the rules and complexity of Jedi type systems requiring me to check in docs to a source control system, report changes to managers what don't understand, have managers that don't understand sign-off on things they don't understand and avoid dumb rules like not being able to train techs that appear to old, etc.
Yeh, if you ask me the Republic, I mean Network as a whole is best off with Sith types in charge versus bureaucratic Jedi types.
Respect the Constitution
The more I see on this case the more I think Childs is being set up as a scapegoat. The guy built the networking side from scratch and it seems management were happy with him running it with sole admin rights. Then a new admin comes in and he freaks out and gets overprotective. And a $5 million bail? Murderers don't get that much.
Heheh... heh... it's kind of funny... you can't network people to work on a network.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Everyone knows the name of Terry Childs, but how many people know the name of the manager(s) in charge, the ones responsible (or negligent) for letting this situation continue until it got to this point.
"You asked for it, you got it." and you are spot on because if they don't correctly assess this current situation, and assign blame to the deserving names, then they are only 'asking for it' to happen again and again.
Thats because only the government related ones concern the public. This stuff happens all the time in the private sector. However, private companies can die, the government cannot (as much as some people around here would like it to)
Seems to me that in many cases, the IT department may be rather grossly understaffed (either in terms of # of staff, or # of experienced staff).
Many places I've worked end up with a Lord-of-all-IT situation simply because they haven't got anyone who can replace him* or back him up, or weren't willing to pay for backup/additional/experienced staff.
* male gender used for convenience purposes.
One of my first jobs was a bank teller. Our passwords were sealed in an envelop, which we initialed, and locked in a vault which needed two keys to open.
If the two officers needed my password, they'd open the vault, open the envelope, breaking my seal (letting me off the hook of responsibility).
IT has to learn from banks.
It's not just when they go bad. What happens if they get run over by a bus or a stampede of wildebeests? If they are the only person to know the admin passwords, commands, etc, they are the single point of failure, regardless if they go bad or not.
Just as we harp on backing up our files (um, yeah), we also need to harp on a backup for the admin. There should always be someone else, even if it's the mayor, who also has the list of admin passwords.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It really depends on who the "one person" is. Committees rarely design good crypto algorithms or protocols, for example. On the other hand, if you just pick the "one person" at random, you risk picking the wrong person.
I guess it's sort of like picking a dictator. If you pick the right person, and hold that person accountable, they will get things done more efficiently than a committee. If you pick the wrong person, they will get the wrong things done more efficiently than a committee.
http://outcampaign.org/
Unfortunately this article is about one periphery admin that had control over only a few routers. The rest has been made up by the city and the media.
Supposedly that's it, according to some of the articles. He thought a lot of the others were screw-ups, so he kept access to himself. Everyone seemed to know it, as well, right up to the top of the IT organization. A new security person was hired, and that person didn't like the situation (may have come up during some sort of review). They made a point of asking him for the passwords, which he interpreted as "hey, we want to screw up the network - you know, the one you feel really possessive about" and refused. Didn't seem to recognize the authority of whoever delivered the message (don't know if it was the new security person or not). They then sent the police after the apparent master criminal.
Also, while they couldn't make configuration changes (that's what "locked out" meant apparently), the network continued to run, even without his intervention. So he might've been a doofus about this issue, and for all I know a total jerk with no people skills, but it sounds like (crazy access issue aside) he knew his job pretty well.
I suspect the new security person (who for all we know is more of a policy person than a technical person) handled it badly on their end as well, and may have gone for a club (formal meetings, demands) when a lunch conversation might've done the trick. The guy shouldn't have held onto exclusive access, but it sounds like the security person didn't handle it well. Apparently, that individual now fears for their safety, which I suspect is either an overreaction or a further attempt to demonize Childs to make it seem like whatever actions taken are justified.
I use the bus example pretty regularly. It's the same reason that I expect documentation for everything. Is writing documentation fun? no. Is it necessary? Perhaps not... but does it save days, or possibly weeks from being wasted? Yes.
As far as I'm concerned... passwords are just the beginning. Configurations and such can also be a nightmare to replicate when they're undocumented. Ever stepped into a project where they only guy working on it is gone and you have to figure out how to setup your machine / development environment just to get it to run? It's awful. All of the "don't install that patch, it ruins everything" or "you have to install these components in this order so that they don't interfere with one another" is gone and you have a horrific puzzle before you.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
This is all a red herring. Any administrator has sufficient privs to block out all other admins should he/she want to. So even if you give the password to five people, it doesn't help, unless I'm missing something.
Currently hooked on AMP
I came into the same philosophy as you a few years ago when I was in the position where I took over a network that was completely undocumented. Now I have Visio diagrams and written explanations of almost everything including a complete inventory of what I have on what network at each site.
I started it with the idea of the bus principle but I've come to rely on it myself as I'm the only admin and so I often have parts of the network I don't touch for a year at a time. This means I forget how things are put together so I refer back to my own documentation. Works every time.
Yeah, I imagine he was aware of a lot more than most other people as admins usually are. I know that I have much more information about the company and how it operates along with its goals than I necessarily need to do my job but it's the nature of trust.
You have to be able to trust your admin so you should treat them accordingly. That is the first mistake of most employers these days. They treat everyone like dirt including the people that can burn them really badly because they don't understand how much their company relies on IT. I know the company I work used to come to an abrupt halt when there was an outage. Since then I've removed the single points of failure, the only thing left is me. They forget that redundant systems get kind of complex though and they assume anyone out of college can do it for 30k so they fight me for 70k.
Now you just need to make sure that the CFO (or Managing Director) isn't the only one with combination to that safe.
I ran into exactly the same situation as Terry Childs in my short time (about two years) working for a municiple organization.
The difference, however, was being more aware of how stupid people are. For one thing... never lock your boss out of the system. Since there were so few IT policies in place prior to me getting there, it gave me quite a bit of leverage (at least early on) toward getting ones in place.
The first thing I did was change the top-level account password. The password I changed it to was completely meaningless gibberish, which was written down onto a piece of paper and placed into a sealed envelope, which was entrusted into the care of the CIO-equivalent position. I told him it was for emergency use only, and it needed to be treated as the most important piece of information he had... which it was, in the practical point of view. In my time there, it was never used.
Afterward, there was a lot of whining and moaning about people who wanted access... so I got to work on logging. All changes were logged, so accountability was in place (at least, as good as it could be. I kinda made it seem like far more than it was), and all specified people were given special administrator accounts (I detest elevating access on a person's everyday use account). From what I recall, none of those people ever used the accounts they had whined so hard to get, because they knew their activities would be logged (although honestly, not logged as much as I explained to them, but that was for everyone's good).
The problem with many of these people was that they viewed the network as a toy which they could play around with to learn... whereas myself and the qualified staff viewed it as a crucially important business asset which needed to work no matter what. So scaring the tinkers by making them know they would be held accountable for any stupidity on their part made them content to only mess up their own work PCs, rather than the network.
It's amazing what a great deterant accountability is!
After reading the REAL story of Terry Childs, it was hard not to feel sympathy for him. Municiple organizations don't really take many things seriously, and don't have many people who have worked in "real", private sector, IT jobs. Many are either right out of college, transfers from other (non-technical) departments, etc, people who don't really view IT as their career, or do but have no experience working in an enterprise IT environment.
The things he was doing are typically managed by an entire department... and that's often the case in public sector IT. I would LIKE their departments to be run the same as a normal enterprise IT shop... but when you have to deal with politics, where's just no political will to do so. Governmental IT is viewed as an expense rather than an asset, and generally an expense which they try to spend as little on as possible. The idiotic conservative "SMALLER GUBMENT!!!" lunacy doesn't help either, since all it does is guarantee nothing can ever be done in a proper way.
So while I can sympathize with him... he could have been more politically aware. The people who were asking for access, had they thought they could get fired for screwing something up, likely would have never used that access. They only wanted it because they didn't have it.