IT also failed to put enough checks here. The article states that the employee still had a valid company account that he could use to access the repos.
The access should have been cut off right away.
The access should have been cut off right away.
In my orgs, when HR TELLS US, in advance, we nuke the creds while they are discussing the term with HR. If HR doesn't tell us, then we have zero way of knowing to kill their account.
When they don't tell us, then termed users continue to have access... again... because we have no way of knowing to term the access.
I was able to recover it from OneDrives second recycle bin so nothing was lost, but I was livid. This employee was literally being fired because they were refusing to train anyone else on their work for "job security purposes", it's not like we didn't have warning this wouldn't be graceful.
They tell IT in advance and maintain the schedule and contact us to adjust or DRAMA. Lots and lots of drama.
Had I been in that situation, I would taken that garbage to my direct Super, which is usually the CFO. I would explain why this is such a horrific idea. They usually agree. If they don't, then I look for somewhere else to work, since I cannot keep PHI secure, when I cannot control who has what access and when.
I'm not going to be held responsible when others callous actions remove all the guardrails. No thanks.
In terms of higher-ups notification the "oh shit can you recover this" call came from the CEO
I don't know what happened to the manager. I can't imagine it ended well for them, pretty much that entire section of the org was on thin ice (acquisition that didn't want to absorb into the company) so I can't imagine it ended well. I know we didn't pursue legal action against the ex-employee, which pissed me off at the time, but I can see the logic in leaving it done and dusted.
The only PHI the company held was what HR had on it's the employees, so not at risk here.
I'm glad to know you didn't suffer for this. It happens so much in the tech world that most of us have installed creature comforts in the space under the bus. I've installed a nice recliner, a small, but tasteful lamp and a few good books to read, during my time under it.
Though I've heard it's quite common in large enterprises that are fragmented due to a lot of aqui-hires, for corporate HR to forget or miss people they supposed to fire and who still remain on the payroll, especially on the satelite offices where there's no on-prem HR and nobody really knows what's going on from central.
A friend of mine was theoretically fired along with his entire team but just not him because corporate HR forgot about him or something, so he still showed up at the office without his team and without any work to do, badged in and played videogames all day for almost a year while getting paid in full, until some other people started asking "hey, who's is this guy and what does he actually do here all by himself?", then they actually fired him, or more like paid him a generous severance package to leave voluntarily in silence and not tell anyone about HR's blunder.
Lucky bastard.
Not a silver bullet, but it covers a majority of these cases.
On the other hand, in a just world, continuing to show up would make it impossible for the company to try and claw back the money. He was available even if nobody asked anything of him.
I am more interested in how he was caught. There are many people around me who seemingly do nothing, he would just blend into the crowd. Were there layoffs or some other accounting of personnel that forced the issue?
It took 8 months for the store to realize this and fire his butt. In his case, it was a meeting. It was an All Hands, his timecard showed he was clocked in, but never appeared at the meeting.
He had to show up at work because he was never formally fired. If he hadn't showed up at work but still collect his paychecks then it would have been breaking the law and the company would have clawed back all paychecks. By showing up at work he was just fulfilling his contractual obligations, it wasn't his fault nobody gave him any work to do so he was legally entitled to collect paychecks while playing games and doing side projects at work.
> There are many people around me who seemingly do nothing, he would just blend into the crowd.
Not always the case. It might be a thing in large enterprises of US/Anglophone countries from what I noticed, but in German speaking countries it's not really common for people to show up at the office and do nothing all day, the efficiency and work ethic tends to be relatively higher, especially at smaller offices. So you stand out, people will gossip and eventually someone above will inquire about that guy without a team doing nothing.
Sure, you can lie to everyone around you about why you're still here without your team doing nothing so they stop asking questions, but lying can still be considered a felony here if the thing ends up in court and get you in actual legal trouble later as they will still find out eventually about you, so it's best to be honest and legally enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Milton has entered the chat.
I've worked at small (<1000 people) firms where there were at least 10 different entitlements systems and removing someone was a nightmare. I can 100% believe that this also happens at large companies (due to acquisition as you mention) too.
Here's an example of how Microsoft supports auto-provisioning from SAP Successfactors for this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/saas-apps/s...
The budget to pay for it.
There has been pushback, but I'm always willing to walk away from jobs that insist on stupid.
...Including the IT guy who was responsible for killing everyone's access credentials...
All of us that were laid off watched the company-wide zoom where the CEO tried to blame everyone who had been laid off as dead weight. They managed to get the other IT guy to kill our credentials the following week.
Then they laid the other IT guy off before anybody had sent in their work laptops or other work equipment because the CEO decided that if the offices were going to be closed indefinitely we didn't need an IT guy. The company had to write off more than $1 million in assets that were never returned, including a number of very expensive, very new RED cameras.
A lot of times, IT's "failures" are just the failures of management.
> The only reason this happened was because they failed to secure their own systems, it was bound to happen
Instead, parent said:
> IT also failed to put enough checks here
My emphasis on the "also".
Jail the guy, and let his story stand as a warning to implement proper IT and HR practices.
Think of it as if he had stolen money from them after being fired: there’s no question that the culpability would be his but also regulators and insurance would descend on the bank’s management asking why they lacked such basic internal controls for such very well-known risks. Most places will remove all forms of access as soon as the decision is made to fire someone because it’s the most likely time to have anything from theft to, in the US, a workplace shooting.
When shitty policies are part of the root cause, then yes, the victim also shares in creating an environment that allowed easy victimization.
You wouldn't secure your laptop in the front seat of a car in NYC or Chicago. Just as you are not to blame with the vandalization and theft of said equipment, you also could have did easy mitigations to hamper it.
People who shout "victim blaming" are also refusing to take responsibility for reasonable remediations that would have prevented the bad thing.