So, a girl got fired at work two weeks ago

[Pepsei]

er, at my company, you can instal any p2p you want, it just won't work. if it is to be secured, the port blocking and proxy server would be the first thing to institue.

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004

Oh, keep in mind that I work at a defense contractor and internet security is a very serious issue. Not to mention we are not allowed to install any softwrae on PCs unless it is certified as safe. And even then, IT has to install it. They even track what you DL where I work!

2 weeks ago she disappeared and I found out she was fired. I just found out the details. This idiot installed a P2P program to download free music. She was using a defense contractor's T3 to illegally share music files! She risked a good paying engineering job for free music! And anyone familiar with P2P programs, you are connecting to places all over the place all of the time. Talk about a security risk.

The funniest (saddest I guess) thing is that she asked her boss if she could use him as a

You mean to tell me a defense contractor does not even have a basic firewall setup to prevent people from using p2p programs? That is scary.

 

[tm37]

Originally posted by: Tremulant
Like SuperSix said, why did she have admin rights? Even if they have to sign a paper, sit through a meeting and repeat an oath that says they can't install software, they will do it anyways if they have the chance.

That IT dept needs to stop trusting their users.

I have admin rights as do a few of us at work.

There is software we need to install but we are suppodsed to get approval when we need to install something new (not just an update)

 

[Apathetic]

Originally posted by: SuperSix
Why don't the have that network locked down more? She installed an app? I can't install ANYTHING on my PC at work and we're just using regular windows security.

Of course whe was at fault, but that IT department needs to get that network tightened up!

If she was working as a programmer, she would need probably need administrative access to get any work done (e.g. installing/testing COM components)

Dave

 

[skace]

That is NOTHING, a guy got canned here because, for a year or so, he was hosting his own amatuer porn off a webserver off his company PC. Nude pics of himself right off the domain.

 

[Whitecloak]

2 Questions...

1. Is she hot?
2. Pics?

 

[Kev]

Originally posted by: NutBucket
NICE! That's one thing I definitely stopped using when told to do so.

Why would you even need to be told this? How fcking retarded can you be?

 

[cerebusPu]

Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004

Originally posted by: MrCodeDude
1. Was she hot?
2. Meh, she's retarded for installing a P2P program at work. I thought it might be for posting on a forum or something.

YES. Body was 10. Face was an 8.5. Honestly though, the body might be my first ever 11 rating.

daymn. it would have made work more interesting.

 

[bleeb]

hhah

 

[cKGunslinger]

LOL - stupid b1tch.

I also work for a Defense Contractor. IT limits what you can do with your PC (no admin rights without asking for them temporarily), but since we are developers, they don't lock down our machines so much that we can't use them efficiently. There has to be a balance, otherwise you'll need an IT staff with a 1-to-1 ratio to employees.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Originally posted by: cjgallen
I was a defense contractor for a year. P2P was useless because of the proxy server. Not only would any P2P not work at all, the chain of command would hear about it being installed almost instantly.

Had a few people looking at porn though, that was a riot.

It amazes me that people still get busted and fired for that. Is it a real addiction that they can't suppress for 8 hours?

 

[feelingshorter]

idiot, work is work..

 

[NatePo717]

internet usage isn't monitored where I work and I can install anything I want!

 

[newParadigm]

Originally posted by: rahvin

Originally posted by: Rogue
Exactly. I've found through trial and error that the harder you lock down a system, the harder people will try to break your systems to do what they want, even though what they want to do does little for them other than violate your policy.

The best deterrent I've found has been to simply let people know that you CAN see everything. When people realize exactly what you can see, word spreads fast and people keep eachother in check. They also function under the assumption that anything they do at any time can be traced to them and action can and will be taken. It's when they think you CAN'T see what they're doing and that you're not actually looking at it that you start to see problems creep in.

Exactly, rather than go on some power hungry trip it's much more effective to let them know that they abuse the policy and they will be in front of their boss explaining it. You don't need to lock the computers down, just punish people that abuse the policy.

I will conceed that there are a few working environments where a lockdown is needed but those fall almost exclusively to call center atmospheres where employees share computers and with the high turnover are essentially temporary. Attempting to lock down the computer of anyone that is a long term employee is just a false sense of security and nothing more than a power trip by IT.

The FDA requires it for all computers that are in a company that designs/duilds/produces/repairs drugs or medical equipment.

All the comps at my dads place are locked tighter than a drum. Although, even though they are locked down, they don't give a rats ass about net usage. He brought in a sapre PC we had at home, and a hub into work. I can connect remotley to it, and set up p2p to download TV shows I dont get cause we dont have cable. Although, I seldom do tthis since we got high speed internet.

p2p on a C3 line was crazy. Only thing was that outgoing connections were hard, b/c i had no listening port (Bit torrent will still work, just not as fast).

~new

 

[DainBramaged]

Originally posted by: RedCOMET

Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004
My company has been canning people over internet abuse and it's something people pretty much have gotten the message about. Even though it'sa company of 11,000.

Anyways, this new girl was warned about a month ago about internet usage and I guess her whole department had to sign a paper that stated they are aware of the rules.

Oh, keep in mind that I work at a defense contractor and internet security is a very serious issue. Not to mention we are not allowed to install any softwrae on PCs unless it is certified as safe. And even then, IT has to install it. They even track what you DL where I work!

2 weeks ago she disappeared and I found out she was fired. I just found out the details. This idiot installed a P2P program to download free music. She was using a defense contractor's T3 to illegally share music files! She risked a good paying engineering job for free music! And anyone familiar with P2P programs, you are connecting to places all over the place all of the time. Talk about a security risk.

The funniest (saddest I guess) thing is that she asked her boss if she could use him as a reference.

CLIFF NOTES:
1) Work at a Defense contractor
2) They are very anal about network security.
3) Girl warned about interent abuse and signs papers stating she knows the issues.
4) Month later, canned for illegally sharing music files, and she actually installed P2P software on her PC!

Darwin award??

Did I miss the part where she died?

 

[Queasy]

One of the IT managers in my company sent out an email the other day because the developer's network share was full of movies and music that the developers had been downloading. He gave a warning and then deleted everything.

 

[Ausm]

She isn't the sharpest tool in the shed 😉


Ausm

 

[alkemyst]

Originally posted by: everman
Why did the IT dept not have proper security policies in place to restrict her from installing it in the first place?

some things require one to be a local admin on the workstation.

depends on the infrastructure.

We have policies that restrict anyone from installing anything except IS admins.

There are higher level restrictions to such as Exchange and Domain administration.

We are an enterprise of about 5000 associates (no call centers, about 25 help desk associates), Fortune 500. Without proper policies in place we'd need a lot more IS staff to keep things working right.

As far as I know there is not any business out there with servers that do not log your internet activity. It's easy to do. Reviewing each user is hard, but that's not how you use logs.

Logs are used when a problem occurs. Say 4 associates did 50 files in a month and one did only 10. Pulling his logs may shed light on a problem. Also sometimes logs help an associate when the manager forgets they assigned a research task to someone.

 

[Toasthead]

wow..thats just dumb.

 

[frankie38]

maybe she came from the future and was trying to get a headstart o skynet.....oh thats only in the movies..my bad.

 

[ryan256]

Originally posted by: Rogue
Why does everyone think that removing admin rights stops unwanted software usage. Lookup Portable Firefox or PuTTY or any number of other stand alone applications that require a minimal number of files and most times just include a single executable file. It takes a tremendous amount of planning and preparation to completely lock down a system and even then, there's always a hole or a gap that someone will exploit in the system. All I would have to do is setup an SSH tunnel on my home PC and tunnel into it over port 80 using PuTTY and there's almost nothing they could do to stop it short of some pricey hardware at the network edge to sniff each packet and kill the traffic.

There's ways around this one as well.

I work at a college university and we have many computers on campus that the students use. We had problems for the longest time with students installing all types of programs, P2P software, and games that did not require administrative rights to run. However a nice solution was found using Domain Policy.
Please see this screen shot.
This little setting allows you to specify what .exes and .coms are allowed to run. You can specify it per user or per machine. If the .exe is not in this list, it won't run! Doesn't matter if you are an admin or not. In addition the secured account is campuswide. Trying to log into a machone in another lab will not remove the restrictions. This has also been very helpful in blocking spyware, adware, and some viruses because their .exes generate a permissions error and are forbidden to execute.
The only way around this is to run something that is entirely web based. But we have a fix for that one too 😉

 

[Rogue]

Originally posted by: ryan256

Originally posted by: Rogue
Why does everyone think that removing admin rights stops unwanted software usage. Lookup Portable Firefox or PuTTY or any number of other stand alone applications that require a minimal number of files and most times just include a single executable file. It takes a tremendous amount of planning and preparation to completely lock down a system and even then, there's always a hole or a gap that someone will exploit in the system. All I would have to do is setup an SSH tunnel on my home PC and tunnel into it over port 80 using PuTTY and there's almost nothing they could do to stop it short of some pricey hardware at the network edge to sniff each packet and kill the traffic.

There's ways around this one as well.

I work at a college university and we have many computers on campus that the students use. We had problems for the longest time with students installing all types of programs, P2P software, and games that did not require administrative rights to run. However a nice solution was found using Domain Policy.
Please see this screen shot.
This little setting allows you to specify what .exes and .coms are allowed to run. You can specify it per user or per machine. If the .exe is not in this list, it won't run! Doesn't matter if you are an admin or not. In addition the secured account is campuswide. Trying to log into a machone in another lab will not remove the restrictions. This has also been very helpful in blocking spyware, adware, and some viruses because their .exes generate a permissions error and are forbidden to execute.
The only way around this is to run something that is entirely web based. But we have a fix for that one too 😉

I'm aware of that, however, you have to take virtually every service executable, every application executable, etc. into account for it to work and that can be a real bear to manage. Couple that with the fact that people WILL simply rename the application they want to run in lieu of a legitimate one they don't use and you've gotten around it again. Short of there being a corresponding MD5 checksum for each program listed in the "allowed applications" list, it can be gotten around again. I never said it couldn't be done, I more or less said it is very time intensive to setup and maintain from an administration standpoint.

 

[ryan256]

Originally posted by: Rogue

I'm aware of that, however, you have to take virtually every service executable, every application executable, etc. into account for it to work and that can be a real bear to manage. Couple that with the fact that people WILL simply rename the application they want to run in lieu of a legitimate one they don't use and you've gotten around it again. Short of there being a corresponding MD5 checksum for each program listed in the "allowed applications" list, it can be gotten around again. I never said it couldn't be done, I more or less said it is very time intensive to setup and maintain from an administration standpoint.

Actually no, you don't have to worry about service executables. And while changing the name of the .exe will work there's still 2 more obsticles. 1) You've got to find the name of an allowed .exe and 2) Access to C:\ is prohibited. When you open My Computer the C drive appears to be gone. It doesn't show up. With explorer hiding the hard drive and command prompts being prohibited there's no way to get at the C drive. Most of these programs can't fit into 1.4MB and you can't burn to a CD. Only option you have then is to run the whole thing from a ZIP disk or usb key, which leaves the computer as soon as you do.

Edit: And while it may create a bit more administrative work on the front end its definitely worth it for all the work it saves down the road.

 

[alkemyst]

if this is an issue...most will have that 'expensive' hardware in place.

Still policies make it easy to secure a network.

Monitor traffic and if you see spikes investigate and at them to the firewall, surf patrol, etc.

If you are dealing in a small to medium business usually exploits are easy.

Once you reach Enterprise level and bandwidth/licensing is a 6 figure chunk of your budget, it gets easier. 😉

Unfortunately at that level admins lose a lot of fun.

We have a tight network. Making sure it is has use hiring 'pros' to hack it and report to us the holes they find.

Bottom line though for this topic...if you are on a network, you are not invisible. you may get by their blockades...but if they have their eye on you it will be seen.