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Wall Street IT Engineer Hacks Employer To See If He'll Be Fired (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
A Wall Street engineer was arrested for planting credentials-logging malware on his company's servers. According to an FBI affidavit, the engineer used these credentials to log into fellow employees' accounts. The engineer claims he did so only because he heard rumors of an acquisition and wanted to make sure he wouldn't be let go. In reality, the employee did look at archived email inboxes, but he also stole encryption keys needed to access the protected source code of his employer's trading platform and trading algorithms.
Using his access to the company's Unix network (which he gained after a promotion last year), the employee then rerouted traffic through backup servers in order to avoid the company's traffic monitoring solution and steal the company's source code. The employee was caught after he kept intruding and disconnecting another employee's RDP session. The employee understood someone hacked his account and logged the attacker's unique identifier. Showing his total lack of understanding for how technology, logging and legal investigations work, the employee admitted via email to a fellow employee that he installed malware on the servers and hacked other employees.
Using his access to the company's Unix network (which he gained after a promotion last year), the employee then rerouted traffic through backup servers in order to avoid the company's traffic monitoring solution and steal the company's source code. The employee was caught after he kept intruding and disconnecting another employee's RDP session. The employee understood someone hacked his account and logged the attacker's unique identifier. Showing his total lack of understanding for how technology, logging and legal investigations work, the employee admitted via email to a fellow employee that he installed malware on the servers and hacked other employees.
Yes...
It didn't seem to occur to him that if he hacked them, it would make the answer to the question of "will he be fired?" a very definite "yes".
Of course, that's if we take his claims at face value; he was clearly looking to get a lot of other stuff, and that's the best excuse he could find. But he's still an idiot for thinking he wouldn't get caught and admitting in an email that he did it.
The guy hacked A UNIX NETWORK! I heard those networks are hardcore, some even use the vi protocol to load balance the kernel across multiple NFS loopbacks. It's basically POSIX grade security with layers upon layers of nmaps.
lucm, indeed.
Want to really get the dirt? Bug your bosses phone. That's how it works in the real world.
Considering "bugging your bosses phone" is one of those red flags that indicate that maybe it's time for a long vacation or for a major change in your career path.
Other red flags:
- asking a trusted coworker to setup parental control on your work laptop so you can't use it to watch porn in the bathroom
- knowing how many heartbeats it takes to do the elevator ride up to your floor
- opening multiple sock puppet Facebooks to see if the cute girl in HR would ignore friend requests from strangers like she ignored yours
- knowing the cleaners schedule so you can sift through people's trash cans after business hours without being caught
lucm, indeed.
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. A hail to code optimization!
Initially, the optimized function bool::willIBefired() will always return true.
After optimization the result actually must be one of true or false.
Lesson learned: Don't let context influence optimization.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This is UNIX. Semantics matter here. Go away, muggle. The gnomes are trying to talk about the System.
Should've gone into finance, embezzle some millions and pay a few thousands as a fine instead. Far more profitable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.