Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access

“PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, where we talk about organizations that are independently self-owned. This week’s tale of toxic tech involves a disgruntled ex-employee who had the means and opportunity to wreak havoc.

Our story comes courtesy of Yad Senapathy, who serves as CEO of the Project Management Training Institute in Dallas, Texas. He recalls a time many years ago when he used to work in IT at a company with more than 1,000 employees.

While Senapathy was working there, the company terminated an employee, but nobody cut off his access to internal systems. The angry worker logged back in, then deleted files, locked out other people's accounts, and even corrupted a database.

"Several days passed where the person was no longer on payroll, but their credentials were still active," Senapathy said. "Nobody had been clearly assigned to shut them off. HR thought IT would handle it once the termination was processed. IT was waiting for HR to send a formal request. I've learned that when nobody is clearly responsible and there is no set deadline, these things can easily get missed until there is already a problem."“

Source: https://www.theregister.com/securit...dollars-because-nobody-revoked-access/5292763

Yep. Processes are great but when you shut your brain off and let something bad happen because you were waiting on the process then you're a bloody idiot. Some people are perfectly content to sit back and watch things fall apart and defend themselves by saying "I was following the process". Usually it is because they resent a lot of the processes and are purposefully rigging the system to make it fail.

And this former employee should be arrested. Just because a door is unlocked doesn't give you the right to go in and damage the contents.

kirbyrj said:

And this former employee should be arrested. Just because a door is unlocked doesn't give you the right to go in and damage the contents.

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Bingo. I hope he was.

Hope it now costs him that much money and legal fees. This is him committing a crime nothing more. Kinda can see why he was let go.

kirbyrj said:

And this former employee should be arrested. Just because a door is unlocked doesn't give you the right to go in and damage the contents.

Click to expand...

He probably was, but was it worth the damages? You hear this story so many times that it just gets funnier every time I hear it. It's a reminder that you shouldn't fuck around with technology you don't understand.