Earlier quoted context omitted.
so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
https://www.nucalc.com/Story/
Just finished reading, love these kind of stories. Thanks for sharing
Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
331–340 of 463 posts
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings. They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then. An older family friend of mine who…
Either your dates or experiences are off, because I've been working in software since 1999 and the easiest time to get a job was quite recent, in the back-half of COVID. The early 2000's were decent, but I didn't experience - or know anyone who did - any sort of "free jobs' period. Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. It's only the in the past year or so that the world has…
During the dot.com bubble, so many folks went to work for startups that old-fashioned corporate IT (in insurance, industry, banks) was struggling to hire. The saying goes that they hired you if you could spell "C++".
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#334> On March 12, 2025, a search warrant was executed at Sohaib’s home in Alexandria. Agents grabbed plenty of tech gear but also turned up seven firearms and 370 rounds of .30 caliber ammunition. Given his former crimes, Sohaib should have had none of this. For god's sake, don't commit crimes while you're committing crimes.
It's funny how it's never just one thing. In my region of the world a crackdown on street racing started a few years ago. It continued because each night the police stopped someone, there was at least one DUI and suspended license. Unsurprisingly those who disregard traffic rules tend to equally disregard other rules.
I'm not a big "lock them up" guy but seriously people don't seem to understand how hard it is to actually get the state to put and keep you in jail. You have to do really really bad things multiple times. The US prison population has been falling for over a decade now and part of that is everybody now faces pressure to not use incarceration as a first (or second or fifth) option
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings. They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
And then US tech has the arrogance of claiming "we don't need unions".
yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years
Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features. The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.
I have door codes and passwords for a major organisation that I last worked for somewhere in the region of 20 years ago. They haven't rotated a damn thing. I still know people who work there, and I guess technically I still support things for them in an informal question-over-a-pint kind of way, but damn me, put in some effort guys.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#337> [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…
the problem is that its so challenging to figure out what the person actually has access to. Have they ever done a export with sensitive information, that is now sitting on their local machine? Any important clients they still are in contact with over email that they may try to sabotage? Any other creative endeavors you haven't thought through?
The most fool proof way is just to nuke the computer in its entirety.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
he went to work for a company we were a vendor for Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.
> Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder.
This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit.
Sounds good for everyone.
We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, it's going to cost you ", and everyone's happy.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#339> At 4:58 pm, he wiped out a Department of Homeland Security database using the command “DROP DATABASE dhsproddb.” This article is hilarious. The two bickering brothers remind me of the guys in the Oceans movies played by Casey Affleck and Scott Caan. It’s amazing they got this close to sensitive data.
As somebody who's spent most of my career in Fairfax County I find nothing about this story even remotely surprising.
Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you don't trust your people so much, why to hire them in a first place? Looking at it from Europe - it is such a weird inhumane practice. Someone decided your position is redundant. Okay, shit happens, economic downturn, etc. Then you have extra 3-6 months of work to pass your knowledge, train replacement and document everything.
sometimes you fire because you trusted them then they gave reasons to stop. At company I work at it happened, but the more common way is just getting info few weeks later then working normally till the end date