Slashdot Mirror
Tech Companies Have a History of Giving Low-Level Employees High-Level Access (theoutline.com)
A reader shares a report (condensed for space): In the summer of 2010, Google fired a 27-year-old site reliability engineer named David Barksdale after it discovered that Barksdale had been accessing the Google accounts of four teens he met through a local Seattle tech group. The spying went on for months before it was reported, Gawker's Adrian Chen wrote at the time. In one incident Chen described, a 15-year-old refused to tell Barksdale the name of his new girlfriend; Barksdale broke into the teen's Google Voice account, listened to messages to get the name, then taunted him with it and threatened to call her. Google was contrite, saying publicly that it "carefully control[s] the number of employees who have access to our systems" and monitors for abuses by rogue employees. [...] The rogue Twitter customer service employee who momentarily deactivated President Trump's account on Thursday night brought this issue to mind. Twitter has 3,898 employees, according to Wikipedia, for 330 million monthly users, a ratio of one employee for every 84,658 users. This means that a single employee may have a ton of power over loads of users, but the value of a single user is low. Their privacy may seem insignificant in light of the greater mob. [...] At Uber, employees regularly abused its "God View" mode to spy on the movements of celebrities, politicians, and even ex-spouses.
This is not surprising in the least. On a physical level, the person who likely has the most access is the janitor or cleaning staff.
Almost any access can be abused, if someone feels vindictive enough. An electrical worker can toss a dead rat in an opened panel, and the arc flash likely would take out a good amount of power in the building.
Having access controls to minimize things are critical, but even with those in place, there is a point where the problem changes from a technological issue to a HR issue, of why someone is that pissed and vindictive in the first place... and why they were cleared for access.