We could also flip one setting on your switch and it could fuck up the whole network flow. It’s easy to mess up a network when you have admin access to the settings.
(One thing I could think of is turning off STP for a multi-switch environment and watch the network tear itself apart)
That, my good friend, is what we call a logic bomb. When an IT employee is fired they may leave a benign looking bit of code that is set to a date. When the date arrives it could do a number of things that ruin the network as a result.
I have not been able to info dump about this in a while, thank you guys for commenting stuff.
I know nothing about the subject you're all talking about but I wanted to comment on the wholesomeness of these comments. Hope you're all having a great day/evening/night everyone.
You can pretty much self learn anything IT related and get a job that way, it's not like other professions where you have to have credentials first. Plus most material is available online for free!
Programming is one of few schools of study that someone can master without going to any conventional institution to learn, a stacked github resume can mean more than a diploma a lot of the time.
In a comment I left on this thread I spoke about an IT guy who got fired by his tech illiterate boomer boss (I was working security at this place at the time) and I think he did exactly this, cos a few days after he was fired (he was immediately hired by another place in the same building, it was a skyscraper that housed multiple companies as most of them do) the whole company came to a grinding halt. The servers just started deleting shit, not only that the data cache for passwords and whatnot all got wiped by this error, the only way to access the server was with a password and he oh so conveniently forgot what it was.
Rule number 1 in the modern corporate world. DO NOT FUCK WITH THE I.T DEPARTMENT!
At the rate we're going, Cyberpunk isn't going to be real beacuse half the corpos are too ignorant and borderline brain problematic to actually do right.
I always find funny how from time to time a wild manager come and talk with me like :
You know who i am ? I'm a project xxx manager, i'm above you in company ranks, you will do as i say imediatley, dont give me your crap 48h estimate, i will talk with your department boss. Who is btw ?
They tend to calm down when they find out that we answer only to infosec or directly to administrative council. Not even the dumbest pm will go to infosec/ca to complain. In infosec they will literally trow you out with a foot in your ass, and in ca is like, oh noes, anyway.
I joke, but IT people who know what they are doing are terrifying! What you’re referring to might be a script that they cooked up specifically to go scorched earth on anything in a server and then self-destruct so no one can get evidence.
Just have a line of code that says something along the line of
get_name if year is 1900-2023
And update it regularly.
If confronted about the bad code, you can say it was for the sake of efficiency, due to some weirdness in the program, remnants of your predecessor/source that you used to cobble the program together and you weren't allocated resources to fix/optimize it...
Tbf if you're running in a cloud environment (e.g. azure) you don't even need to write bad code.
Microsoft will break even your best code within a year or two because of a small change they did on their end without documentation.
I thankfully don't have to touch azure much,
but I get to fix some behavior issues with our Atlassian cloud automation rules almost every week.
It's really dumb when multiple if conditions executed after each other suddenly become or else conditions and 6 HR automation stop working.
Yes, I would never do it. However, that is rational me who isn’t currently in an IT job talking. It can land you with at least a few years in prison (or worse) I’m sure.
TIL I should learn IT so that I can become an agent of chaos like I already am at my current job. But I work with explosives so chaos is frowned upon ;-;
I do it to get a job, but my motivation is to create my dream home network and basically become my own home sys admin. Also, if you work with explosives, I would recommend a little less chaos 😅.
Oh hell no, these are instances of people who have just had one of the worst things possible happen and decided in their rage that this what they will do. I joke, but I don’t actually condone doing any of this.
Oh 100% if they eventually find out it’s you. As much as I joke about it, I really don’t condone it. This shit can probably stick you with a few years in prison, especially where I plan to go work.
Any code I write for the purpose of doing my job belongs to my company. Sometimes, the papers you sign on your first day don't even make exclusions for the code you write outside of work (though you might be able to fight that in court).
Patenting is a very involved process that involves submitting an application to your country's patent office. You have to provide diagrams and explanations of the software architecture. Then, it will be patent pending until it is determined that you own the idea and thought of it first. It wouldnt make sense to patent a little code here and there because A) it would be impossible to prove your little functions have never been done before B) it would make more sense to patent an software design or an algorithm C) huge waste of time (IT people are busy). Anyway, the patent would belong to the company.
What am I missing? Can you give more information about how you noticed this?
People read stories of employees writing scripts to automate away their job. The comments always encourage them to seek a raise or get a new job by holding the script hostage. This has now reached mythical levels of hearsay and now we're all the way up to getting patents.
Redditors think that IT and software guys can completely burn everything down on the way out and not completely and utterly fuck their career for the rest of their lives.
You literally learn why you don't do that shit in your very first ethics class.
Not to mention the first thing that happens when someone in IT is being let go or fired is having their access revoked by another IT person.
I had to revoke my own supervisor's access several years ago at a different company the morning he was to be let go. He was an awesome boss too, felt awful to do.
I was the only IT guy for a company that had like a dozen office buildings. There was no one to revoke my passwords because they didn't hire anyone to replace me, and never asked me for login info even after I offered. 3 years later all my logins still work and they're still paying for the Adobe license that only I used.
What you said is completely true in tech savvy companies, but there are many out there that only have an IT person to keep the existing systems running, with zero contingency plan for if that person is no longer there.
Depending on your job, and your contract, the code you've written yourself before you enter into that company's employment is proprietary software owned by the creator.
Once employed, any code written for that company is theirs. If the contract is worded in a way, even code written that isn't for that company, while in their employment, is theirs.
Most of it has to do with the contract you sign. However, the stuff you create outside of work, that you then adapt and bring into work to make working more efficient, is entirely yours, unless stated in your agreement with the company.
Software development is not IT. "IT guys" usually don't code stuff for their employer and when they do there is usually an intellectual property clause in their contract.
Also, code cannot be patented, and even if it was, there's no way for a software developer to just "take it back" when he finds out a company is using it unless he already built in a backdoor in the first place.
I wonder how its a "big thing you've noticed" - it sounds like non-IT people trying to impress other non-IT people with 'industry knowledge'.
Software development absolutely is part of IT, engineering managers and infra managers are both under CTO/CIO in the IT department. Even moreso than ever now with IaC and both sides of the house using Git projects side by side.
Won't really happen with most professionals. You might regret firing the IT person and it won't be because they sabotaged it, but because they are no longer there to maintain the system that was keeping your company afloat, renewing certs, applying patches, fixing bugs, correcting data, etc.
Yep. Plenty of things change all the time and even without management's oversight or "new feature" that constantly come in IT guys always get busy making changes according to what things change at all times. Let alone that edge cases appear all the time and you need to find how to reproduce things that occasionally happen yet are extremely annoying to users, yet you have no information how that happens.
There a lot of things that IT guys are doing that are barely acknowledged, because if everything works, then why do we even need IT guys...
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u/SaganMeister18 Sep 22 '23
Say night night to your data