Hacker News Reader

Comment by robotnikman | Hacker News Reader

>The court documents state that Brody's employment was terminated after he violated company policies by connecting a USB drive containing pornography to company computers.

And this is why you have one laptop for work, and one for personal stuff, and never use your work laptop as your personal laptop.

View on HN

Kinda weird line, to me. Curious if it was for connecting a third party USB drive at all, and if so, why mention the porn.

It seems like companies either have a strict USB policy, or don't. If they allow USB drives, it feels odd to me to fire someone over a drive containing porn. What if it was a genuine mistake of confusing two drives or something? Or a genuine drive that happened to just contain something copied by accident.

But if OP was say, copying, streaming, or uploading the files, then that seems like a more clear violation than what the article states.

I have worked at (regulated) places that have a zero-tolerance policy for porn and work computers. Not Illegal, it's Violation of Corporate Policy; a fireable offense

Wonder how was their drug policy?

I can see some firms afraid of porn but distributing leaflets about safe fentanyl use, lol.

Lots of people drank at lunch, or late lunch. There was also a zero tolerance for (illegal) drugs; no testing. I saw people get terminated for porn, drugs (very obvious ), getting a (married) co-worker pregnant.

I saw a VP keep their job after a drunken accident at a corporate function where they broke their leg.

Yeah, you'd think if he had a legitimate need for USB storage then work would issue it to him right? And then in that case, if he was using a work USB storage device with his personal computer for personal data storage, then that's an issue in its own right, regardless of what the data is, but it seems it would be more straightforward to just say that.

You would think that, but it's rarely true. Getting issued a $10 USB drive could take a ton of paperwork and red tape, and eventually end with a "yeah that use case seems inconvenient but not worth us doing stuff". When you have one sitting on your desk or in your pocket already, that's a tempting one

Honestly in my experience every company I've worked at has had some kind of explicit cybersecurity policy or training telling us not to use USB drives, so from a CYA perspective I think I'd be very hesitant to plug one in to a work laptop at all. But I have only worked at massive corporations, so my experience is limited

I'm surprised banks even allow USB based storage devices to be connected. There are tools you can run on managed systems to block these devices from being able to be used.

I agree but there’s probably selection bias here: the place which doesn’t deactivate accounts when they fire people is so dysfunctional that it’s no longer surprising that they botched harder controls.

banks are just like every other company. Don't assume your bank knows what it's doing just cause it's a bank. Their core product isn't security, it's financial services. They benefit from security sure, but they don't profit off of it directly. They are going to have the bare minimum security, to make everyone feel like they will stay out of the headlines.

Financial services tend to have a lot of compliance related things thrown at them.

The crazy thing is, it wouldn't surprise me if they did this on purpose to capitalize in the future. How else can they get $529,000 to copy git repos from a backup back up onto GitHub?

Unless maybe they have no backups in which case, how is it possible that a banking institution could have code that lasted 50+ years without backups. Also the damages without backups would likely be more than $529,000 because they just lost the entire history of their apps.

Someone should have told this guy you can look at porn on your phone!

Not your work phone ...

Work phones typically can't detect that as they have a security model that better protects the user's privacy.

And yet, like many things you could do undetected, you still probably shouldn’t do that. Assuming it’s against work’s rules for their phones, anyway.

+ phone + usb drives

Reply on news.ycombinator.com