Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr-wendel | Hacker News Reader

Caught a senior sysadmin in a small company using a proxy on our infrastructure to hide misc web browsing from oversight. The logs were the give-away. It was typical misc IT/nerd news stuff... the kind of thing a different company culture (which did come later) would actually encourage.

I was sure the right thing to do was to report it to the CEO (there wasn't anyone else higher in the hierarchy to consider) for certain chastisement and correction. I was commended and the sysadmin got a browbeating.

I definitely did right by the policies in place. However, not too long after I realized there was certainly a better way to handle it and my behavior had more to do with scoring points than doing the right thing.

This was also someone who went out of their way to mentor younger employees and help kindle a passion for this line of work. I was a major beneficiary of this, so I look back upon that incident with nothing but regret.

View on HN

A humble and honest story of growth.

Normally, depending on the circumstances, you might have a quiet and subtle word with someone about something they really can't be doing, whether because it's a real problem, or because of some silly political reason.

But it's also worth mentioning that someone's slightly mischievous "just something to browse reddit" could actually be cover for a covert channel or backdoor, intended for some darker other purpose, such as exfiltrating data, or providing access to criminals. Or it could have innocuous intent, but be a weakness exploited by an attacker. Or it could someday inadvertently be a red herring diversion that slows response while investigating a real attack.

Thanks for sharing!

So, a question in balancing the regret against knowing what you know now. This situation sparked a change in you to recognize how to handle these situations better. Would you make the same mistake again in order to learn the lesson?

Absolutely not. I would hope to learn the lesson some other way.

In hindsight, it equates to kicking someone hard in the groin for laughs. It hurts my foot, them a lot, and it's just a poor way to learn how to earn "respect".

Thank you - I appreciate the perspective!

That is a hard one. Best to report it I think.. but it is not clear cut in general.

There would be times when going against your employer by blowing the whistle or covering up is the more moral thing to do.

Deciding where that line is not simple and there is no guide.

Imaging to do different was only one part of the lesson. The other, and bigger, part is acknowledging the difference between wanting to do the right (for not just me) thing versus that was sure to score points with authority.

Why would it be good to report it? Depending on what “infrastructure” stands for here, unless it is something absolutely unwise security-wise, why?

When I was young, I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter - for example, never holding the door open, even for a colleague I'd worked alongside for a long time.

And I thought that petty rulebreaking was a corrosive force, something that would snowball into bigger problems down the road. As a man of honour I would work precisely my contracted hours, never a minute less, I would consider it shameful if someone so much as stole a pen from the office. The rest of the team is heading to the pub at 4pm after a lengthy day of planning meetings? Sorry guys, I don't finish until 5:30pm.

Later in my career I chilled out a lot, and learned that the actual rules are often different (and a lot more nuanced) than the written rules. And that if you've worked with a guy for a decade you can, in fact, hold the door open for him and the sky won't fall down.

> I thought that being a man of my word meant that, as I'd given my employer my word that I would follow their security policy, I should follow it to the letter

This basically sums up my "cover story" nicely so I didn't have to admit to myself that it was more about scoring points for my own position.

Dressing up vanity as integrity is a dangerous thing.

Thanks for sharing, I had difficulty empathising with the OP but this puts it in perspective.

I’m curious, did these ideas come from your upbringing?

I can't agree. By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems. Even things like tech debt are all over the place framed as project/people management rather than tech stuff at its fundamentals.

The comment already established the senior sysadmin is generally a valuable person who does a lot to flourish the company. Going out of the way to be a encumbrance towards someone who is verifiably doing their job anyways, means you're actively creating a people problem. I;d rather people learn the correct, bigger lesson here.

> By far the biggest lesson that you can verify even on this thread, is that the biggest tech problems are actually people problems.

The opposite lesson is also useful: sometimes you can turn people problems into tech problems, and that's how you can 'solve' them.

Slightly hypothetical scenario: assume your team keeps all the source code on a shared drive. You are supposed to coordinate with your coworkers before touching any code. Sometimes that goes wrong, and looks like a people problem.

If you introduce eg git and automated-tests-before-merging, you can turn that into a technical problem.

My thesis is that organisations (and people in those organisations) can only solve so many people problems. If you lighten the load by automating some of the problems into tech problems, you have more levity on the remaining people problems.

(This happy state of affairs isn't always possible. And sometimes it can backfire.)

It's a guy browsing the internet a bit. This is not some deep philosophical question. You're just advocating being the type of person we'd all hate to work with.

“It’s a guy browsing the internet a bit” can be game over from a security perspective. Some machines should never execute code from public web pages, full stop.

So it is a philosophical question of why the restrictions were in place in this scenario. If it was “employee productivity”, then sure, who cares. If it was an IRS computer with thousands of people’s tax returns on disk and access to millions more, then reporting was the right move.

If he was the most senior sysadmin it's already his responsibility to keep things safe anyway, so if you trust him for all the rest of the infra you can trust him for a proxy.

I'm not so sure.

I can imagine trusting someone to set up (and even enforce) eg an alcohol policy, but still be prone to alcohol abuse themselves.

Weak wills are a thing. Or people thinking they are smarter than the protocols that apply to the masses.

All I mean is he is the person paid to do this already so it's not extra dangerous. It's like a policeman doing a citizens arrest if they spot a crime on the off hours. It's frowned upon but you know it's the same thing they do in their job.

Our HN user, mr-wendel, worked at the company, but I'm not sure they said what their job was. It might have been sysadmin, but since mr-wendel talks about snitching on a senior sysadmin directly to the CEO, it's save to say that the sysadmin did not report to mr-wendel; and I presume that mr-wendel was a lot lower an the pecking order.

I don't think the senior sysadmin was paid to hide browsing from the oversight?

I'm not defending running rogue workloads on your employers infrastructure, that's obviously wrong. I'm just saying from the description, and the role of who did it, it probably wasn't super problematic in terms of security.

I think this thread highlights nicely that context is everything.

In this case, I think vasco's take is correct: the sysadmin was indeed trustworthy enough to exercise this discretion in response to overzealous employee productivity rules without at all undermining his primary responsibilities.

The proxy was definitely in a place to essentially trivialize it's impact. I'm pretty sure thats why it was placed where it was, as opposed to make it harder to find. If that was the chief concern, disabling logging would have obviously been the first thing to happen.

The reason you report is to make the call if he should have had that level of trust in the first place.

You never know... I've seen an instance where it turns out an employee was watching pr0n at work and downloading the materials to their shared profile directory. Discovered when the IT Admin was requesting a new NAS server because the current shares were full.

edit: to be clear, it wasn't the admin downloading the content.

Your values are the guide.

If your values are to report someone to win brownie points with your boss, it’s probably time to revisit them.

Another great guide is asking yourself what you’re trying to accomplish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com