Interesting Story to anyone working in the tech field

[Desert Monkey]

Couple more stories like this and we're all back to pen and paper.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1&Yay

If this cat gets off, imagine the guys working in the basements at the fortune 500 companies round the country - all the sudden, the midnight techs with coke bottle glasses and "Magic - the card game" collections will lock up thousands of systems "for protection".

"We're the only ones that know best!" and "Henry can't have access to this system, he'll just fill up my clean RAID 5 with all kinds of un-fragmented programs!"

I think the guy may be right in what he claims was happening, but his solution of using a nuke to resolve the issue is just too much.

 

[JVD_X]

Couple more stories like this and we're all back to pen and paper.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1&Yay

If this cat gets off, imagine the guys working in the basements at the fortune 500 companies round the country - all the sudden, the midnight techs with coke bottle glasses and "Magic - the card game" collections will lock up thousands of systems "for protection".

"We're the only ones that know best!" and "Henry can't have access to this system, he'll just fill up my clean RAID 5 with all kinds of un-fragmented programs!"

I think the guy may be right in what he claims was happening, but his solution of using a nuke to resolve the issue is just too much.

1st... what would have happened if they guy died in some accident? Then what would have happened? They wouldn't have the password that is for sure. Just the fact that no-one else had the appropriate admin privs shows that the system was mismanaged from the top.

 

[david_42]

Considering some of the guy's remarks about a network he built ...

Most large scale networks are setup so a new password can be propagated to critical components rapidly. Of course the reasoning is to quickly block out some wacko who just quit.

Just about any system can be hacked, so someone would have been able to get in eventually.

Bottom line: It's San Fransisco. Corruption & incompetence are required.

 

[EdWort]

If they are Microsoft, give me physical access to their servers and I'm in with a special boot CD from Winternals in less than a minute.

 

[Chairman Cheyco]

Couple more stories like this and we're all back to pen and paper.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1&Yay

If this cat gets off, imagine the guys working in the basements at the fortune 500 companies round the country - all the sudden, the midnight techs with coke bottle glasses and "Magic - the card game" collections will lock up thousands of systems "for protection".

"We're the only ones that know best!" and "Henry can't have access to this system, he'll just fill up my clean RAID 5 with all kinds of un-fragmented programs!"

I think the guy may be right in what he claims was happening, but his solution of using a nuke to resolve the issue is just too much.

Don't you mean Magic:The Gathering The card game?

 

[adx]

There are some serious holes missing from this story on both sides.

The biggest problem is there was a single guy who knew the passwords. However, there are issues about how the city treated all the employees in the department. The turnover was supposedly very high and there were issues with former employees accessing the gear about 3 or 4 years ago. After that happened the guy got totally paranoid because his head was on the line.

 

[Desert Monkey]

Don't you mean Magic:The Gathering The card game?

Yes. Yes I do. My mistake, it's been a few years since I played.....

 

[k1v1116]

Call me a conspiracy theorist but having met people who work in jobs like that, I'm tempted to believe that guy's story over the city's/his colleagues. The kind of bureaucracy that city employs belong to is not conducive the maintenance or security of a computer network.

 

[PeteOz77]

If they are Microsoft, give me physical access to their servers and I'm in with a special boot CD from Winternals in less than a minute.

Same here with Mac OS X. Gimmie 5 minutes and let me take the server down and bring it back up and I'll have your a new password in place in seconds.

 

[pen25]

thing is the manuf have back doors built into them all. they can recover the password or set a new one. just takes the things to come down to flip a switch to set it. causes down time but it fixes the problems. BTW this was in thier network not the servers. so like thier cisco juniper routers.