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Fired Techie Created Virtual Chaos At Pharma Co.
itwbennett writes "Using a secret vSphere console, Jason Cornish, formerly an IT staffer at the U.S. subsidiary of drug-maker Shionogi, wiped out most of the company's computer infrastructure earlier this year. Cornish, 37, pleaded guilty Tuesday to computer intrusion charges in connection with the attack."
Shouldn't a "too long; didn't read" section be shorter than the rest of your comment? And it should provide a summary, rather than go off on some tangent.
which is totally what she said
I know this might not be a popular opinion, but why should a business "really care" about keeping the IT department happy over any other department? Yes, they could do a lot of damage, but so could ANY disgruntled employee who walks in with a gun and starts shooting. Companies should treat ALL employees with respect, not grudgingly cozy up to IT because they feel like IT has them backed into a corner.
The other sense that I get from your statement was that it seemed like you were blaming management here. It feels a bit like, "Well, they didn't keep their IT staff happy, so they brought it upon themselves!" We don't know what the disagreement was, nor who was at fault for that disagreement. People get in disagreements all the time about relatively minor issues. Perhaps Shionogi wanted him to do something one way and he wanted to do it a different way. That's certainly not worthy of revenge. Right now, we just don't know. The simple fact remains that Mr. Cornish committed an act that was unethical and illegal and did substantial damage to the business. Yes, poor management controls and practices allowed this to take place, but they weren't the ones who committed the act.
What's to stop you from backing up their sensitive data and creating your back doors before you hand in your letter of resignation? If you treat your employees well, and create an atmosphere of mutual respect, when the time does come to part ways, the last month or two of employment can be constructively used to tie up loose ends and easing the transition to the next guy. If you, as an employer, have a policy of escorting someone from their workstation the moment they hand in their resignation, you're basically paying someone to twiddle their thumbs while your remaining employees scramble to cover for the guy who now is suddenly gone with no warning, while they must be thinking whether it's really worth it, just to get the same treatment when they are leaving. The "Perp walk" is just as petty a show of revenge as the guy in TFA and as damaging to the future your remaining employees to do their job. The only difference is that it is unfortunately not illegal.
I wouldn't blame management for the damage, but it certainly is foolish to not take proper precautions when firing IT staff with administrative access. The damage a disgruntled IT employee can cause these days is akin to burning a building down 20 years ago - you could lose everything.
Get a web developer
Has anyone noticed that every system claiming "enterprise" robustness only ever protect against untrusted third parties or component failure? I think there's an enormous amount of research waiting to be done to develop systems that are robust against attacks by rogue administrators. Think about it this way: a modern distributed cluster can be made robust against nuclear warfare, but not a grumpy admin!
Technologies like the kind developed by internet pirates could be applied to enterprise systems. For example, protocols like Bittorrent are designed to be robust against malicious peers. The lessons learned by Wikipedia (where everyone is an 'admin') could be applied too, such as enforced versioning of all configuration changes.
Similarly, multi-party authentication should be an option for critical enterprise systems. It should be possible to mark objects such as VMs or service accounts as "critical", allowing configuration changes only if, say, three admins authenticate together, like in a nuclear launch. This isn't a new concept -- Certificate Authorities often require secondary approval to issue certain types of certificates.
The need will become ever greater as the trend of moving away from tape towards snapshots and replicas accelerates. Do you seriously think Google backs up to tape? Or Amazon? Or any cloud provider? They don't! They just keep two to thee copies of everything, and hope that none of their thousands of administrators ever cracks and does the equivalent of "rm -rf *" on the entire cloud all at once!
Unfortunately, a business with general purpose servers running Windows or Linux are out of luck. Even if someone were to come up with, say, a virtual hosting environment that's robust against even administrators, that wouldn't prevent other mass attacks, such as formatting the SAN (shudder), deleting every object from the Active Directory domain, or my favourite: setting an encryption key on the backups for a month before leaving, wiping the password, and then formatting every server in parallel. Just resetting every password in the system at once is enough to bring most organisations to their knees, and can be done in seconds! How long would it take your organisation to recover from that? You'll just restore the AD from tape, right? Step one: log on to the backup server... err...
Remember: Mirrors won't help. Replicas won't save you. Snapshots can be deleted just like everything else. If the business didn't have off-site tape backups of everything, it's game over.
Yes... it's the "how can you get away with it?" question that boggles the mind. If you can't think at least that far ahead, then you should refrain from doing more than "wish damage." (You know, I wish something bad would happen to them because I hate them kinda thing?)
If it were me, I would do something more subtle... something based on a cron job perhaps ... something that runs, clears out logs and other things, mounts VMDKs, deletes random files, exchanges the file names of various random pairs of documents and things like that. It would be weirdness that people would dismiss at first as human error which give the trail time to grow colder and bad backup data to get worse and then at some point just go all-out, destroying itself and the systems -- preferably killing the hardware in some way. Even then the chances of getting caught are pretty good as it would be a careful balance of luck and planning to create this gradual corruption of data that wouldn't go noticed until it was too late... perhaps only corrupt files older than a certain date which are not as likely to be accessed for a long while.I suppose that would be enough to allow the corruption of backups and such along the way...
Anyway, the first thing should always be to plan not to get caught or even suspected.
...make it impossible for some elderly people (along with some kids with cancer, and perhaps a few diabetics) to get their meds.
Oh yeah, and incidentally, cost my employer money.
Douchebag of the Year Award candidate.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Actually it sounds more like a stage magician asking an audience member to confirm, in fact, that there's nothing up his or her sleeves. With that much unprompted "satisfy yourself that there's nothing wrong!" going on, it sounds like he at least knows something.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!