From what I've experienced, most holes in the system that would allow that are problems with management policy. We've been lucky here in that we haven't had any cases of a disgruntled employee raising a little hell when they leave, and most folks here have the knowledge to do it -- it's a tech support company.
In the last 6 months, we've finally been able to convince managers to let us at LEAST fill in some basic security holes. Prior to this, for example:
- Every user was given the same password on a new account, with no forced change or expiry
- Accounts were left active (with VPN access) for one month after termination, "just in case"
- Every user is added to the local administrator group on their machine
- No BIOS lockdown (I've had users building their own machine images)
Most of us that were getting annoyed were a result of fixing other random issues that arose from above... People installing BitTorrent and Limewire and work and hammering the firewall with them can be a bit of an issue.
Thankfully, we've had some management changes. All it took was for us to sit with the new managers, explain the issues, and most importantly, WHY these are problems. Most managers don't have the technical knowledge to understand why certain problems are problems, and most technicians don't have the ability (or patience) to talk to a manager at a level they can understand.
I work as a helpdesk/support technician in an IT-based company. The majority of our employees are contracted by Nortel for either customer support or documentation services. Most of them have a basic understanding of a computer and various common applications such as MS Word, Excel and so on, so during their training sessions, we take a very short amount of time to orient them to local company policies and procedures. This mostly entails an overview of the intranet, some specialized software (such as an Oracle front-end), and a tour of where to find help when needed.
That last part usually involved my pager number;)
All-in-all, it's quite effective for us, and usually only takes about 20 minutes. No videos, no flash, just hands-on "Follow the link" activity.
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From what I've experienced, most holes in the system that would allow that are problems with management policy. We've been lucky here in that we haven't had any cases of a disgruntled employee raising a little hell when they leave, and most folks here have the knowledge to do it -- it's a tech support company. In the last 6 months, we've finally been able to convince managers to let us at LEAST fill in some basic security holes. Prior to this, for example: - Every user was given the same password on a new account, with no forced change or expiry - Accounts were left active (with VPN access) for one month after termination, "just in case" - Every user is added to the local administrator group on their machine - No BIOS lockdown (I've had users building their own machine images) Most of us that were getting annoyed were a result of fixing other random issues that arose from above... People installing BitTorrent and Limewire and work and hammering the firewall with them can be a bit of an issue. Thankfully, we've had some management changes. All it took was for us to sit with the new managers, explain the issues, and most importantly, WHY these are problems. Most managers don't have the technical knowledge to understand why certain problems are problems, and most technicians don't have the ability (or patience) to talk to a manager at a level they can understand.
I work as a helpdesk/support technician in an IT-based company. The majority of our employees are contracted by Nortel for either customer support or documentation services. Most of them have a basic understanding of a computer and various common applications such as MS Word, Excel and so on, so during their training sessions, we take a very short amount of time to orient them to local company policies and procedures. This mostly entails an overview of the intranet, some specialized software (such as an Oracle front-end), and a tour of where to find help when needed. That last part usually involved my pager number ;)
All-in-all, it's quite effective for us, and usually only takes about 20 minutes. No videos, no flash, just hands-on "Follow the link" activity.