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Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

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Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absolutely vile personal attack. This is the poison contained in the blooming flower of the internet.

The poison of the internet thrives on 140 characters or less, it facilitates lies wonderfully. The truth needs more words. Twitter is Musk's preferred medium. Trump's too.

You're a sad little man.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#374
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

"There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD" I have very different experiences from a SEC regulated company. With SOX there are controls to prevent such a thing to happen. If this is a SOX breakage, Tesla is in deep trouble with the SEC.

Can you explain how Sarbanes-Oxley applies to the situation of an employee sabotaging a production line? Specifically how it would inherently imply wrongdoing on Tesla's part.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand. Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. Not from a policy standpoint but from a security and access perspective.

> Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. That's completely unnecessary and should not be the case. If you need something pushed quickly, you can get a colleague with review bit and get them to ack for "urgency" reasons after a quick lookover.

I've seen lots of places that think they have a process in place that prevents this. I've very rarely seen places that actually had sufficient security in place to prevent someone with malicious intent from actually finding ways of bypassing it if they were prepared to break company policies and/or the law. I'm sure they exist, and more places ought to take this seriously, but part of the problem is a lot of places think they have processes in place that ensures they're not vulnerable.

Often it boils down to not taking sufficient measures against social engineering. In this case the claim is they used fake usernames - most places I've worked, successfully getting a fake account if you already work there would tend to "only" require a willingness to lie on a form or two ("fake" a contractor) and then request elevated privileges. Very few places I've done work requires sufficient checks or counter-signatures to require additional accomplices or make it harder than that. They do exist, but they're rare.

The state of security most places is quite depressing at times. Then again, most of the time it's enough.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand. Even with code review policies, there is still a short list of people who can push to production without going through code review. Not from a policy standpoint but from a security and access perspective.

The chain we had in ${BIGCORP}: Programmers: read-write to repository Staging team: read-only on repository, read-write to test servers and staging zone Deployment team: read-only on repository and staging zone, read-write to production It wouldn't prevent malicious code going out but at least would require a chain of cooperation between employees, which would be harder to achieve.

So the deployment team could write and push malicious code to production?

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#377
post #125
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very naive comment. There will always be a small handful of engineers that can push the button to move code into PROD or even change code in PROD live. Ideally, with mature controls, the people in this list is short. But to jump to the conclusion that Tesla doesn't use good practises is very short sighted. Who's to say that external parties didn't target this person specifically because of their role/influe…

Why is it naive to expect there not to be a single point of failure like that? Code reviews are a thing.

There may have been. The article speaks of the employee using "false usernames". Code review may stop some foolish person pushing broken code, but it's not going to prevent a determined saboteur who's masquerading as other authorised users.

Re: Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee

#379
post #367

Everyone's reaction to this seems to be "He is crazy / paranoid". He gave very specific examples of things this person did. If you were someone with a large position against Telsa, or a competing manufacturer, or an oil / gas company finally picking things up after a terrible oil price collapse, yeah maybe it makes sense to go mess things up subtly enough that the company slips a little bit closer to bankruptcy? I'm…

This is the crazy thing about the stock market in general, it incentivizes you to cheat and get dirty in a lot of ways when a large amount of your money is in it.

If anything, the stock market discourages this, because without it, people with a lot of money invested into things wouldn't be able to liquidate it at any price (before the investment matures), so they'd be more motivated to deploy illegal means to protect their wealth.
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