Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks so much for jumping into the thread.

As a former systems person, I thought of all the ways I could divine that an account was related. IP address of course came to mind, but I dismissed it, because so many networks use NAT, etc. (Especially at high schools, there must be so many accounts with the same IP. But I get that the student goes home at night...)

So you're basically saying this SRE made an educated guess. It does make me feel better about that part :D

Much of my professional life is evangelizing Google Apps. I know and advocate the party line about security. And I have experienced the customer support staff who have access when helping me troubleshoot. (I'm glad they have access.)

I guess I just assumed/heard that SRE's weren't involved in troubleshooting user stuff, as they were in deep disk i/o, networking, performance stuff. (Translation: was hoping they couldn't access user stuff.)

As for internal auditing, it would be cool if there was an alert any time user data was accessed that didn't have a corresponding trouble ticket.

Thanks again for jumping in the thread.

You're welcome for my jumping in, sorry I later decided to not attach my real name to it. There are reasons for why that would be unwise.

Yes, I believe that he made an educated guess for the accounts, possibly off of IP.

As for the security stuff, you're familiar with http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/security-first-... and the linked white paper at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/pdf/ds_gsa_apps_.... The "Access Control" section says that we grant access to as little as we can, to as few as we can. All access is logged, and the security team has the logs. I'm sure the logs are about to be audited. I wouldn't want to be a Googler who had violated the privacy policy!

SREs do "production stuff". Responsibilities vary widely. Some need access to user data. Most don't.

I have no idea what alerts exist, or will be made to exist. I have confidence in the security team's ability to find effective ones.

S'okay, Google already knows it was you ;-)

> made an educated guess

Grandparent deleted their post, but, assuming they just said "they correlated across IP" -- it's actually easy to guess, since the snoop would be able to detect and ignore a NAT IP -- it would be accessing thousands of accounts.

AFAIK Google's SRE's are more fancy sysadmins than performance engineers. Sysadmins often have the keys to the kingdom, though one would hope a sysadmin on project X only has the keys to project X.

...one would hope a sysadmin on project X only has the keys to project X.

That is indeed how Google works.

Working at big banks and credit card processors I can tell this sort of insider abuse happens everywhere. And firing a bunch of people instantly for breaching policy actually does work as a good dis-incentive. Whether this raises the question due to the amount of data the Google knows about everyone of us could the impact of any potential insider abuse be magnified is a something for debate.

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