Sysadmins forced to CLEAN UP after bosses WATCH SMUT at work Oops: according to a malware study from ThreatTrack Security, “visiting a pornographic Website” is one of the top four reasons that companies' “senior leadership team” members cop malware infections. The study talked not to the victim companies, but to 200 malware analysts that had worked for infected companies. They found …
A bit like the "I was just following orders" defence - they don't wash any more.
You KNOW you shouldn't be accessing x,y and z material from your company device. You KNOW we can track this, you signed off the expenditure ffs. You are the weakest link, goodbye!
Today's advice was brought you by Sesame Street with the letter P and the number 4 and 5.
Yeah who needs "stuxnet" style hacking when all you need is a picture of some tits, or a sign saying "free", and they will infect themselves ....
However like a lot of ordinary people not just "bosses", these idiots buy my New PC/Boat/Car, paying to remove them, so I am not that sad, that they are that stupid, in fact I think thats what Windows PC & Mac is all about, a complicated system with lots of holes, that falls over when prodded by idiots, that they to pay to have fixed, keeps everybody in industry happy & busy ...
This is not new:
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much as we all like to make fun of senior management, this is only of those executives that had malware-- it's an aposteriori, not an apriori distribution. We have no idea based on this information what fraction of executives surf porn from their work computers or whether it is higher or lower than non-executives. Concluding that executives are "complete berks" isn't supported by the evidence.
It's not meant to be entirely fair, in fact it's not meant to be fair at all. The proportion of executives surfing porn from their work computers is necessarily higher than that of non-executives, non-executives who probably believe that some IT bod is monitoring all internet activity all the time, and is just waiting to pounce on someone who is caught out. Conversely, the caught executive is expecting their rank to trump the BOFH, and keep their "infraction" on the quiet.
The main question, however, is whether being a complete berk is merely necessary, or both necessary and sufficient, to be an executive, porn-surfing or otherwise.
I certainly don't want to know the aposteriori distribution of those executives. Probably quite large, I'd imagine.
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When they are complete berks, they deserved to be called out on it.
One such complete berk I had to deal with had text porn in the recent file list. I wasn't overly offended, but it was against company policy. Policy he had to sign off on before it was distributed. No, I don't think he was a complete berk because he had text porn on his PC. That was just a proxy for his berkness. I know he was a complete berk because even after the I Love You virus, he thought it would be a good thing to use a company PC on the network to put up an FTP site with a public facing IP address and anonymous WRITE privileges. And yes, he was a manager in the code writing division of the company, so he had absolutely NO excuse.
well, he ran it until his contract ended then the server was discovered and all was erased....
his (eventual) next job was a permanent IT support position at Parliament (nope - not Westminster, this will remain some un-named EU country) where I guess the executive p0rn SAMBA-share will still be running....
Came from the idiot who opened an attachment in an email 'from' himself that he knew he hadn't sent. "I wanted to see what was in it," he said.
Months later, they were the boss of the project.
I lost all respect for PRINCE2 accreditation when they managed to swot for it from scratch over a weekend.
I worked in one place that employed the owner's son.
Basically, he was a waste of space and you didn't want him to do anything for you, as you'd have to bin it and start again. We were the only place that would take him on and his father thought it would make him less likely to get back on drugs if he had a day job.
Since this oxygen thief did nothing productive, he used to sit and surf porn all day.
Then, for some reason, his PC would stop working.
I had to clear off all the malware, empty his internet cashe to get a bit of disk space (he wasn't getting a new machine just to porn surf).
To make things easier, I decided to remotely clear up some of his crap every day, rather than take a day out of my project to fix his machine.
I struck upon the idea of redirecting his porn sites to various other sites.
Sometimes I redirected the whole site, so that his favourite dogging site took him to a Scooby Doo fan site.
Others, I just replaced the images (sometimes www.randompornsite.com would store all their images via image.randomspornsite.com (note, these are made up urls. go to the pages at your own risk) making it easier to redirect to a fake local server) with My Little Pony pictures.
It took him a while to catch on as to what was happening, but it was fun checking the list of sites he had been on (mostly with non-work related, porn sounding names) and adding them to his hosts file with my new address.
Many years ago, when bandwidth was much more of a limited resource, we were finding that once a month our off-site friday backup would fail.
Until I noticed that also on that same day, one of the bosses from the states was generally over.
I eventually found out that he liked to nip back to the office for some porn surfing after going to the pub.
I then had the unenviable task of having to kindly request that he didn't chew up all our bandwidth on a friday night...
I remember those days. The CIO was hot to stop anybody who was streaming music to their workstation, video surfing was likely to result in a one way trip to HR.
And speaking of berkness,... well let's set the stage first. For whatever reason the statistical programming department was running SAS on desktops instead of proper server even though they had 30-45 people writing code for it. And all of the data was stored on the desktops because at the time the drive connection was faster (or at least thought to be) than the network connection (we were fortunate enough to have migrated desktops to 100M even though the printers were on 10M). Now the IT department didn't have enough money to buy the agents and the tape library that would have been needed to do a proper backup of all that data. And the previous IDE tape backup devices were failing with Win98. So he opted for an early over the internet backup solution for all those workstations. Each station acting as its own server so we didn't have to have a concentrator server in the network and consequently no data dedupe ability. Jobs were set to start around 8:00 at night and tiered until 1:00 am local time with a 6:00 am cuttoff time. Yet somehow he was surprised when after a full work week (including a weekend when the backups could run all day) we still hadn't finished getting our first pass of backing up all the systems.
Y'all are clearly not in Florida. The Gunshine State has the True Pros at this. See http://www.scoop.it/t/the-billy-pulpit/p/2960933982/2012/10/12/boynton-beach-florida-cop-downloaded-400-porn-images-on-his-work-laptop-while-on-duty-blamed-son.
Frank Cerabino, a columnist at the Palm Beach Post, has a (paywalled, unfortunately) expose on the (Mis)Adventures of Florida Man in which m'man Frank details the high points of recent Gunshine State revelations. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/state-regional/cerabino-misadventures-of-florida-man-provides-a-c/nbhNH/
Even El Reg has had a few Florida Man Adventures, such as the gentleman who was found passed out on FL826, due to the fumes from the 200 kilos of a certain leafy vegetable substance that he was carrying around in his vehicle.
I was working for a global company integrating all their offices. When we went to integrate one of our european offices, the IT manager managed to convinced his managment that they couldn't adopt the centralised state of the art firewall infrastructure because it wasn't compatible with their website (yep his management were fairly gulible), so they allowed him to keep 'his' local firewall in parallel to the corporate one, and even though we requested audit access he refused saying the system couldn't handle it.
One day about a year later I get a panicky call from their senior managment, can I have a look at their firewall configuration.
They gave me all the login details and the I confirmed what they had suspected. The IT manager had been running his own Internet porn site on company equipment.
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