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88% of IT Admins Would Steal Passwords If Laid Off
narramissic writes "According to identity management firm Cyber-Ark's annual 'Trust, Security & Passwords' survey, a whopping 88% of IT administrators would steal CEO passwords, customer database, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company's list of privileged passwords if they were suddenly laid off. The survey also found that one third of IT staff admitted to snooping around the network, looking at highly confidential information, such as salary details and people's personal emails."
99% of men masturbate. The other 1% are lying.
Sounds like an unreasonable estimate to me. If people were that vindicative and dishonest then IT (and similar) systems wouldn't ever keep working.
Yea, and I'm training to be a cage fighter.
More like 88% of IT Admins like to say they would steal CEO passwords if laid off, but something tells me when the time came to break the law they would let the opportunity slide.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
12% of all admins were laid off today in order to clear up resources for paying ransom on old passwords...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
88% of IT Admins Would Steal Anything to get Laid
Let me guess...
Deleted
I'm actually surprised at this claim. It would be nice if they posted some additional info, like their sample size, etc. Sorry, I just seriously can't believe that 9 out of 10 people would maliciously act in this manner. Snooping over the network out of curiosity, I'll buy that one.
How many of them are just saying that to sound cool?
What ever happened to sysadmins being known for having strong/good morals and ethics?
"According to identity management firm Cyber-Ark's annual 'Trust, Security & Passwords'"
Making the IT folk out to be bogeymen is great business for security pros. I'm sure there are some idiots out there, but most IT people are normal honest people like anybody in any other profession. I don't buy that we are so far off the curve, 81% is bullcrap and makes me question everything about that company and it's motivations and methods for the survey.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
A firm selling data security products claims that people with access to sensitive information can't be trusted. News at 10.
I haven't, I wouldn't. At best you encounter some of those things during ordinary work or even unproductive boredom.. but I totally see no value in having such details of a place you no longer work.
(Of course here in Europe there's a due notice so you have plenty of paid time to find a new job, but still..)
Maybe I'm just daft or weak?
.. I have a 120dpi scanned transparent GIF of the CEO's signature.
There is a war going on for your mind.
....you take a survey saying something like "Have you in your work had access to..." or "Have you known company information after leaving..." which you often have then tweak it into "IT admins spy on you and will steal your IP" in order to make FUD and sell your product? I think I know enough people in the IT business to tell that these numbers are horribly off.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It could be just me, but I honestly don't care enough about what other employees or coworkers are doing to bother sneaking about their crap. If it's anything like their desktops, I'm probably going to see hundreds of cute kitten photos, pictures of family and a bunch of music hidden under folders named things like, "NotMP3s".
When I was an admin (short stint so I could pay bills, 3 years) I usually didn't give a rat's ass about what the users stored on their system unless it showed up in my virus scan reports or I was told to investigate someone due to "suspicious behavior". (BTW folks, before you get off on the 'evil spying on users' tangent for me, it was only twice and it was two girls working in tandem selling info to another company on how much certain people were paid.) I never could understand the whole "I have the power!" attitude some people showed when it came to passwords or how they'd screw the company if they were laid off. If I felt I was unfairly fired or downsize or funsized, whatever, that's what my lawyer is for (he works for cheap cause I fix his laptop, heh). Why complicate issues by fudging with the network access?
Maybe I'm just too young to understand yet. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to play with my army men, we're planning an attack on the tan army on the coffee table and I gotta move equipment for em.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Better go the pre-emptive way: make offside backups before the shit hits the fan.
Bad idea. You'd get a 5 yard penalty on the play.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If I'm ever show to the door, I would insist on my ability to operate on the system being terminated at that moment. I don't want VPN access. I don't want an email account. I don't want SSH keys. I sure don't want the boss's password. Why? Because I don't want to be accountable for anything that goes wrong afterward.
Think about it, people. If the IDS catches you SSHing in a couple of weeks after you've left, then they have carte blanche to hold you responsible for whatever breaks, even if it's totally unrelated. Good luck convincing a jury that Oracle coincidentally just happened to explode an hour after you logged into your old workstation. Seriously, what good can possibly come from putting yourself in that situation?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
When someone is laid of for no apparent reason, they often feel hurt and betrayed. A natural reaction is that the trust between them has already been destroyed.
At one company I was with, a sysadmin was on a conference call, and had his hands full when the call ended. The CEO never hung up the phone, and started talking to his assistant about people loosing their jobs and how much severance would be paid. The sysadmin, who probably should have hung up when he was first able to, couldn't resist listening for a short time. After a couple of minutes, the CEO finally realized that his phone was still on, and hung up the line. By that time, the sysadmin knew that several people would be laid off soon, but not how soon, or which people.
He informed a couple of his friends that the company was in worse shape than he had realized, and discretely began updating his resume. Within a month, the company was bought out and closed down by another company and everyone lost their jobs. He was asked to stay on as part of the transition team and that the new company would pay him, but after a couple of days, it was clear that he had been working for free and the new company was not going to honor the agreement.
At that time, he still had sysadmin access, and began to look through emails of the former employees. Some, including the CEO, were still getting and sending emails through web access through the old company server. He learned that although the board of directors did not want to spend the money to make sure that the fired employees could still have health insurance for a couple of months, they were willing to give the former CEO $25,000 for his efforts.
I have always said that a good sysadmin knows all the secrets of a company, but a great sysadmin knows when not to look. In this case, was the sysadmin justified in looking after he had been promised to be paid and then told he was not being paid? (Yes, his access should have been cut off, but he was the one who would have had to cut himself off and he was never told to do so.)
Although this situation may be unique, I think that many sysadmins may feel the same way. Once they are betrayed, they no longer feel the need to stay loyal to those that betray them.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
You've never seen my personal IT Bible, the Archives of the BOFH.
He exemplifies keeping a system running smooth THROUGH vindictive and dishonest means.
He's my Hero.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
as for who they actually ... who knows?
300 felons recently paroled for computer and technology related crimes.
I routinely gave my superviser written memoranda with my passwords written on it, the last time I worked in the shrinkwrap software industry. When the inevitable (and somewhat volatile) parting of the ways finally came, I got even by doing absolutely nothing. Information entropy had miraculously lost, hidden or evaporated every memo of mine, along with every trace of me in my spotlessly clean cubicle, so when my work (plastered with non-disclosure agreements in effect for two more years) suddenly became unavailable in plain sight -- Microsoft Windows 2000 was one thing they did VERY well -- I'll be doggoned if I could recall my password! Struth, too. I always picked 32 character secure passwords, just like Best Practice, and those things are darned hard to reconstruct after a week or so of cooling off. They didn't offer hypnotherapy. They fired my super, too. Moral: Never, ever call a damn fine programmer analyst a "coder."
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Another reason to hire older admins, younger ones get bored easily and as a result commit more mischief, I remember the last few years I worked, it seemed that the younger people were always trying to find out how to bypass Squid to go look at porn sites, etc.
It just made my job harder and more annoying. Short attention spans and an inability to function without continuous entertainment seems to be a common failing among millennials.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Sabotaging a network is no different than setting fire to the building.
B-b-but, but but, they they took my stapler. It's the - the red swingline model.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
I've been through a couple of layoffs. In one, the company was concerned about stealing, sabotage, and other vindictive behaviours. So they surprised everyone with two week severance packages and an escort out the door one morning. They brought in people at the butt crack of dawn to turn off every computer in the building. Later, "core" people started deserting the company, taking whatever they wanted with them.
In the other one, there was an announcement, something like, "The 20 people in this room are being laid off. Starting in two weeks we're going to lay off 4 people per week for 5 weeks. We expect you all to continue to do your jobs as well as you can *while* you look for work. Let your supervisor know of any scheduled interviews, they will be considered paid time off. As you find work report your start date so each week we can try to lay off people who already have new jobs."
The second layoff went without a hitch. The people laid off kept relations with the company, some came back later.
I know it's not the same as firing someone, but it does seem to me some companies treat laid off employees as if they've been fired.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
This is one of the things that I love about proxy firewalls. I have colleagues that try to run connections over port 80, and then get stopped because it's not HTTP. They come complain to me, and find a very unsympathetic ear.
I am bothered by the poor ethics of those around me. They think nothing of talking in the aisles about which BitTorrent sites get them the best movies, or how they only watch screeners or play cracked games because only stupid people pay for entertainment. They get frustrated when they run into refusals when trying to get the discs or keys for Microsoft software for which they have no clear need, and try to talk me or the other two people who do have access to them into giving it to them. I tell them that if they need it cheaply that bad they should get a TechNet subscription. They usually just wander off at that point, or sometimes storm off, as if they were somehow entitled to it.
I used to grab everything that I could off of various sites, pulling things down over Kazaa or eDonkey at the time, but I've left that in the past. I've got a job that pays well, and I know they're not underpaid.
I think that ethics in IT have slid dramatically downhill, so that the norm seems to be that people don't want to get caught, rather than not wanting to break the ethics guidelines in the first place. I'm not sure what exactly to do about it, other than try to set a good example. But even then, I've heard some suggesting quietly to others that I'm just hiding my own sins (hint to those people: make sure I'm not in the cubicle next to you when you talk about me). I'm at a loss at that point.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The last thing I wanted was to be in a position where someone hacked the systems and I got blamed because I "knew the passwords"....
I even handed over my personal notes on the network and had my boss shred the ones he didn't need before I left.
I can't believe there are that many admins who have that little respect for themselves that they'd be willing to steal passwords.
-merlyn
League of Professional System Administrators Code of Ethics. I have a copy hanging on the wall by my desk and I refer to it regularly to keep me honest. Integrity is the biggest asset for any system administrator.
... Is being missed.
I was vindictively fired by a total idiot. I made sure that everyone I knew at the company knew the hows and whys of my dispute (including where I _was_ at fault). I also always start grooming my replacement the first day I take a job or can identify the best guy to replace me, because who wants to be stuck in the same job forever.
In the days following my firing I took several opportunities to talk the guy who replaced me (my friend Dan) how to lock me out of various machines and such.
For almost eighteen months people at that job were forced to say "is a good thing (my name) made sure we had extra capacity laid in while the trench down the block was opened", or thing-x was purchased, or policy-y was in place.
By the end of that eighteen months, the guy who had fired me had been shown to be the kind of person who he was, and he was invited to leave the company. (I was long gone and made no attempt to return.)
If you have to "do something" to your company to make them feel the pain of your absence when you are gone, you weren't previously doing your job.
Competence, and never looking back except to laugh, is the best revenge ever.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
In other words, now that you've had your fun you're going to go criticizing the young whippersnappers having theirs.
Most of them aren't young. I'm 33, and the majority are about my age or older. With one exception, the youngest is 30.
Even when I was 'having my fun,' I was smart enough not to talk about it out loud at work. Keys were sometimes passed along quietly, but that usually happened when walking between buildings. Bursting into a room announcing that you've found a download site for the movie being released this weekend is bad form, but it's happened a few times this year alone.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.