Secret snooping rife at work
p2pnet.net news:- While you’re, “working innocently away, little do you realise that one in three of your IT work colleagues are snooping through company systems, peeking at confidential information such as your private files, wage data, personal emails, and HR background, just by using the special administrative passwords that give IT workers privileged and anonymous access to virtually any system,” says Online Recruitment.
If that were not bad enough, “more than one-third of IT professionals admit they could still access their company’s network once they’d left their current job, with no one to stop them,” says the story.
It’s quoting a survey released today by Cyber-Ark Software which carried out the research at last month’s Infosecurity Exhibition as part of their annual survey into ‘Trust, Security and Passwords’.
According to Online Recruitment, an IT admin, “laughed out loud as he answered the survey, saying: ‘Why does it surprise you that so many of us snoop around your files, wouldn’t YOU if you had secret access to anything you can get your hands on!’ ”
Another said it was easy for an employee to update the personal password to their laptop, “but to change the administrator password on that same machine? It would take days for IT to do them all by hand. In the end, we just pick one password for all the systems and write it down,” says PC Pro, adding, “Cyber-Ark, found that 20 per cent of organisations admitted that they rarely changed their administrative passwords with seven per cent saying they never change administrative passwords.
“Eight per cent of IT professionals revealed that the manufacturers default admin password on critical systems had never been changed, which remains the most common way for hackers to break into corporate networks.”
Also See:
Online Recruitment - Survey Reveals Scandal of Snooping IT Staff, May 30, 2007
PC Pro - IT staff confess to perusing confidential data, May 29, 2007
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
