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Company's Former IT Admin Accused of Accessing Backdoor Account 700+ Times (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
"An Oregon sportswear company is suing its former IT administrator, alleging he left backdoor accounts on their network and used them more than 700 times to search for information for the benefit of its new employer," reports BleepingComputer. Court papers reveal the IT admin left to be the CTO at one of the sportswear company's IT suppliers after working for 14 years at his previous employer. For more than two years, he's [allegedly] been using an account he created before he left to access his former colleagues' emails and gather information about the IT services they might need in the future. The IT admin was fired from his CTO job after his new employer found out what he was doing.
One backdoor, which enabled both VPN and VDI connections to the company's network, granted access to a "jmanming" account for a non-existent employee named Jeff Manning...
One backdoor, which enabled both VPN and VDI connections to the company's network, granted access to a "jmanming" account for a non-existent employee named Jeff Manning...
This is why you need all accounts backed by an HR system. The employee record changes to anything but active, all access is automatically revoked. It amazes me in this day and time that there are still rogue accounts in large enterprises. This is also a great case for single sign-on where you kill all access in one place.
IT people usually have all the keys to the kingdom, and when they leave, anything that might go wrong they will be scapegoated and blamed for by current management. For people who actually want to run a reasonable business that isn't full of a bunch of sociopaths playing masturbatory politics, whenever a manager blames the last person in a position, they are really doing is eliminating their own ability to learn and grow. Depending on the enterprise, that can lead to legal shenanigans as well.
Once you're out the door, you're out. Don't even leave yourself the ability to VPN into work or access systems, don't try, don't even ping the external IP's. If management needs you after that, you charge contractor rates, 50% upfront, 50% at time of delivery, all in writing, and watch for bankruptcy filings so you can get yours in first.
With that said, guy obviously did not have the slightest clue on IT security or he'd figure out how not to get caught.
One of the two accounts he was using was a "service account". You probably have a few of those on your system also, that were not created by any system linked into your HR. The manning account probably should have been automatically disabled however.
Seeing as he had IT level access, no automated steps are going to be very effective. If he created the manning account manually and there never WAS a mannning user, any automated HR system that removes employees on departure will never trigger on it since it was never in HR to begin with. If your HR system does whitelist filtering instead of blacklist, it has to know which internal and service accounts to skip. (or chaos insues!) An intelligent IT person will simply flip the necessary switches to make the account not show up in the pool that's being whitelist-checked. There's probably an "Employee" checkbox in the account list, and he just unchecks that, and now the HR script ignores him.
dscl . -list /Users | wc -l
shows there are 103 accounts on my laptop, only four of which are actual interactive users, the rest are system users like sandbox, daemon, windowserver, etc. A marauding system admin can pretty easily sneak in another plausible looking system account into the list of users that don't show up in most userlists.
tl;dr: it's not so easy to detect when someone in a privileged position like IT (or your IT admin) has installed a back door. Hiring someone to come in and do an audit (or hiring a competent replacement that does the same) is your best response to an IT departure, and is really a NECESSARY response to any departure of upper IT, even if the departure was on good terms.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Another popular trick is to give one of those service accounts a shell and password so they can double as logon accounts.
An Oregon sportswear company...
Why the generic descriptor? Say the name of the company - Columbia in this case. It's not as if no one has ever heard of them or they need their identity protected. Plus the company is named in the article.
Indeed here's the ranking of who has the power to decide how things actually work in a modern company, from least powerful to most powerful:
Line workers
Line supervisors
Mid management
Directors / VPs
C*O
Board of directors
System administrator
If the system administrator wants all of the CEO's documents to disappear, they can make that happen, during their employment or even after they are no longer employed. A company should be careful who they have doing system admin, because the admins can read all of your email, change your files, etc. That's one reason it's a *brilliant* idea to outsource this work to people you've never met, and who are in the other side of world, untouchable by your country's law enforcement.
This is totally true and feasible in the enterprise. I work for a company that sells a product that aggregates all existing accounts, and then periodically sends out emails to managers saying, "Here's a list of accounts belonging to your team." The manager has to approve each one or revoke them. That way, there is accountability down the road if it turns out there were lingering accounts that shouldn't have been accessible or exploitable. Can also be used to certify the accounts on each remote application by the application "owner" or administrator.
These certifications are then reviewed by third-party auditors to validate their completeness. Several other vendors offer similar variations of this functionality.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'll just leave this here:
http://io.fondoo.net/
"Fun fact: you could telnet to password.io.com from anywhere in the world, and log on as guest. Lynx, a text-only web browser, was configured as the shell, and you would then be presented with a sparse version of the web-based customer account tools found at http://password.io.com/. This was so customers could reset their own password, update their address, set their PLAN file, etc.
IO forgot to disable browsing the filesystem (press g, period, enter). Also, IO never enforced uniform file and directory permissions or audited active accounts. As a result, through 2004, after IO was taken over by Prismnet (or later), you could roam around and directly view many customer's private files, email, and IO's sensitive system areas. You could also open the Lynx config to define a custom "editor" and thus actually edit files, or run executables. This was a direct back-door into everything! This continued a full two years after IOCOM "hardened" their network to sell network security services."
In most companies, high-ranking technical personnel, such as this CIO, either have access to the backups or can get such access. At least that's my experience. Even when backups are handled by an external company, an IT person can call Iron Mountain and cancel the backup service (just before wiping the primary mail server).
Even in large companies, many sysadmins have full access to everything, especially those involved in any sort of identity management. In most WIndows environments and projects I've worked on, I've either had or had the ability to gain domain admin access, which is basically as good as having full access. Since we're not licensed professionals, most of us don't learn anything about ethics or the way to responsibly manage your access. I do want to keep my reputation somewhat intact, so whenever I leave an employer or get assigned to another project where I don't need the access, I'm very careful to give it up completely. I take the time to ensure everyone involved knows I've disabled accounts and handed access over to the next person. I've had a couple times where an employer has asked me to come back and help the new guy for a couple hours, and I make sure they create new accounts and remove them immediately. It makes sense -- you wouldn't let an employee you fired keep his badge and keys regardless of the situation.
Of course, this situation sounds like the person was planning from the outset to set up his own backdoor and use it. As much as I hate the idea of malpractice insurance, I think it might be time for something similar in the IT world. Computers and access to them are more important than ever and having someone do something like this can damage a company's results and reputation.
Before you hang this guy out to dry, please keep in mind---innocent until proven guilty.
First, this is not back door access. (Something he could have set up.)
This is leaving yourself keys to the front door though legitimate accounts regulated by IT and company security.
Back door access would be installing an unauthorized program that provides remote access without the knowledge of company IT.
That is to say you cannot claim back door when the user is legitimately logging in through the employee VDI.
I wish to draw your attention to the sheer volume of logins as an indication of reoccurring scripting and not malicious intent.
You would have to be an IT worker to understand this but there is no damn reason to login 700 times to steal data. To make a real life
comparison, that would be like invading someone's home 700 times to swipe files off of the counter top.
Speaking of jmanning, that could easily be a user test account for a variety of applications and modification to service
account could easily be within the scope of work at that site. And frankly, when he is no longer with the company
he shouldn't be accessing data---and the company should close the account, but it is not unheard of to transition
an admin gracefully or for the new admin to be unfamiliar / an idiot and the CEO to call up the old one and ask for help.
And, we certainly don't know the full story.
While the people here are may be qualified to judge this guy, the court of public opinion really isn't.
They tend to take IT issues and blow them out of proportion. Every field has criminals.
Professional ethics are all that stop IT guys from going rogue. Doctors and Lawyers don't discuss secrets.
News reporters don't give sources. IT guys don't go rogue with data. CEO's make bad decisions and deals.
There's no movies about IT guys getting fired for applying a patch that disrupted business
and walking away and handing in his badge and credentials to people who have no idea what happened.
IT guys are professionals. We are treated like digital janitors with all the shit we deal with but we have a code.
I would make the case any critical employee can sink a company ship though incompetence or on purpose.
Your IT guy for the most part does what he is required to do and goes home. That's it.