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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

This is the same company that was in the news back in October related to harassing its own female employees with fratboy douchebag behavior:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/26/21535089/surveillance-co...

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To be fair, it was a specific person with a set of other employees who were all punished for the incident. It wasn’t the company which includes the people were harassed.

The headline oversells it but your comment undersells it.

The specific person and set of other employees were "a group of men in leadership positions on the sales team", including the "sales director". When found out,

> Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan gave employees in the Slack channel [i.e. those involved] a choice: leave the company or have their stock options reduced. All of them chose to stay and take the stock option cut, according to Vice. “I was shocked. To me that’s not just a fireable offense, that’s a career-ending offense,” one employee told IPVM.

It says a great deal about the CEO's character and judgment that he even considered for a moment not firing everyone involved.

The video event annotations or filenames described in the article sound like what you might get out of a company culture that allowed the previous behavior to go largely unpunished.

It was not clear to me if the Arizona prison (the customer) chose those filenames or Verkada did. I could see prison guards doing the same thing... archiving clips that they find entertaining and naming them inappropriately. Not defending Verkada, I just wish the article made the culprit more clear.

From a different article, seems like the staff

> Inside Arizona’s Graham County detention facility, which has 17 cameras, videos are given titles by the center’s staff and saved to a Verkada account.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/hackers-e...

My mistake. Would edit if possible.

Never trust a man named Flip.

Edit: Argh... it's Filip. HN's tiny font strikes back.

Even if the CEO is unshameable, the investors can be. Here they are[0]. Remind them publicly they invest in a broken company and make their association toxic as and until they distance, disinvest and hold the company and its officers fully accountable.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/verkada/company_fina...

You need a have subscription to see all investors...

I can see them all just fine.

Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Felicis Ventures, Meritech Capital, and Next27 are the lead investors.

1. Sequoia Capital

2. First Round Capital

3. Felicis Ventures

4. Founder Collective

5. Meritech Capital Partners

6. Next47

7. Fifth Down Capital

8. Nick Candito

9. Hans Robertson

10. Idan Koren

11. Hector Garcia-Molina

Edit:

I used AdBlockPlus to block their pixel-filter, and then when I went back in they served me this nice message: Access to this page has been denied because we believe you are using automation tools to browse the website.

Javascript is disabled or blocked by an extension (ad blockers for example)

wink

Why is a sales employee enabled with access to the surveillance footage of the home office? It's not trust-inspiring.

Exactly. I'm not entirely surprised to see a company with a history of unprofessionalism and poor security policies, hacked.

You would be surprised the unrestrained access given to sales and support employees at most small SAAS companies.

Good catch. I wonder if it’s just kharma or they were targeted specifically in response to those behaviours

Or maybe companies run by sleazy people have less than stellar infosec/netsec practices, or are prone to sweeping gaping security holes under the rug rather than fixing them, which will inevitably result in something like this.

It's talked a bit more downthread, but I mean if the sales director is making public slack channels featuring female employees alongside explicit jokes, then long-term thinking may not be a strongly selected for attribute at the company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906940

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