Live data from Hacker News

Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

arstechnica.com

91–100 of 463 posts

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#91
post #55

How did they get access to 5k passwords? Are they being sent/stored in cleartext? This is the most baffling part of the article for me. The second part I'm unclear about is how you could pass SOC2 when you aren't terminating account access simultaneously with the employment termination.

And how exactly do you want to store passwords if not in plain text (and then encrypted of course)? 5k is a lot, the authorization process is broken, but this is not related to how the passwords are stored. The only solution is correct access segregation and a bastion

I hope youre joking

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#92

No back ups? Skill issue.

Not many people test their backups. I've encountered some situations where the backups didn't work. And one previous employer who was so lazy that he didn't rotate the backup tapes so that the one tape cartridge was used so long that the oxide layer was rubbed off of the tape - so it was no longer brown but was transparent instead (imagine adhesive tape with no adhesive).

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#94

> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked." Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as…

When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. This is absolutely a standard and has to be for these kinds of positions. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't for the majority of IT staff. You meet with HR, someone clears your desk, and security walks you out.

Having people with that level of access without some form of two-person-control is already a sign of incompetence.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#95
post #72

imagine the delete-fest the current whitehouse is going to do in a few years all with pardons waiting so they can't be convicted they might not even wait a few years

"Legal Eagle" has a new video about this. The administration's viewpoint is that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, plus the President owns every document, so he can't be forced to return anything because it belongs to him.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#96

> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked." Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as…

When you are talking about access like they had "make firings as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately" not doing this is incompetence. This is absolutely a standard and has to be for these kinds of positions. I've never worked anywhere where it wasn't for the majority of IT staff. You meet with HR, someone clears your desk, and security walks you out.

There is a middleground, but it requires conscious effort to prop-up, support, and maintain over the long haul: off-boarding centers.

I worked for a Big Tech company that actually did this, and it made the transition a lot easier. You could still access corporate resources necessary for the transition (HR, benefits, internal job postings, training offerings, expense reporting, etc), check-in with colleagues 1:1 (who would be warned this person was no longer part of the org, attachments could be blocked to prevent exfil, etc), and still send/receive email internally (though external was blocked by default and required justification).

You can safeguard your corporate infrastructure without actually cutting everything off entirely and sending someone home to stew angrily about it. In fact, there might be (as yet undocumented) advantages to letting folks exist in that transition period on that segmented infrastructure, so as to identify potentially bad actors before they can do harm and see about mending bridges.

Of course all of that requires conscious investment in projects with no clear quarterly/yearly KPIs to measure cost or success against, so most employers will never remotely consider it.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, who else would you hire for the circus?

Perhaps don't hire people who act as foreign adversaries for government work? Is that really such an absurd proposition?

Yeah. Here in america, we demand domestic adversaries!

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#98
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, if we're at the point where we're so paranoid about being laid off that we don't dare leave a single piece of personal property in the office then I think we're in a very dark place indeed. Can’t imagine the mental damage from considering losing your job every single day you wake up.

I never left anything valuable or personal at my desk when I worked in an office simply because I had a very nonzero number of colleagues who acted like animals. My fizzy waters, coffee, and snacks would be consumed without permission or replenishment. Chairs, monitors, and input peripherals would get swapped without asking. Desks surfaces would be sat on with chairs used as footstools. Corporate effluvia of all type…

I always thought it was weird that all of the equipment issued to me beyond the laptop was registered to me, such as the monitors and desk phone. Your comment enlightens me... That's wild to imagine folks just swiping things from other peoples desks. We even have storage rooms of office supplies where someone could drop off their crate of paper and binders if they had one for some reason.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At 4:59 pm, he asked an AI tool, “How do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases?” He later asked, “How do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012?” So many red flags, I can't even.

Ready access to AI tools sure makes vandalism easy.

This vandalism is a joke. You could find the method in an XKCD comic.

The fact that they didn't already know how to do it is the crazy part.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps don't hire people who act as foreign adversaries for government work? Is that really such an absurd proposition?

I don't think they were spies. They have ethnic names, but it sounds like they are just good ol' red-blooded Yankee crooks.

I can understand wanting to be perceived as being on “the right team” but that comment is so silly that it undermines credibility. To put it otherwise, could you imagine a scenario where I had a labor, arbitrage opportunity that involved a higher paying job in Shanghai, China and that I had lived there for a few years to do that. Let’s also say that I was found guilty of some similar crime. Would you call me a good old fashioned red-blooded Chinese crook?

It’s OK to acknowledge that economic migrants are a thing, and that they likely have only transactional interest in where they live, such as a Bengali construction worker in Dubai, for example. That’s just part and parcel of labor mobility. For better or worse, shareholders, or middleman representing shareholders, have decided this sort of thing is a really good idea in the US, and now around half the population falls in that bucket. It’s a free country, and freedom means being free to choose short term interests. That also means you’re free to support such policies because they are good for Blue-team redistricting so we can provide free healthcare to all 8 billion people in the world somehow.

But please, nobody becomes a Yankee by the mere fact of standing on the ground. If you want that pejorative title, then you need to earn it.

Post reply on HN