Independent

It’s the 1990s, and this pilot fish is hired at a big international company to maintain a group of Linux servers — and they definitely need help.

“My initial survey of the systems uncovered some serious security problems,” says fish. “Everything had been set up and users added with no regard to security.

“As a temporary holding action, I set all the users’ login shells to a custom restricted shell that allowed each user access to only the directories and commands necessary for their work while I analyzed all the systems, planned a decent security configuration for each, got approvals, did testing and, finally, implemented the new security.”

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This organization’s IT security officer leaves and isn’t replaced. “A year and a half goes by and the organization suffers a web page defacement,” says a pilot fish on the scene. “During the course of the remediation, another server that has a couple of Trojans on it is found.”

That’s not really a big surprise. Since the infosec guy’s departure, the CIO has repeatedly demanded that ports be opened in the firewall, external connections be made to servers bypassing the firewall and servers in the DMZ be connected to internal servers.

The support manager objects every time — and is always overruled.

“Worse, support isn’t part of the process of selection or meetings with potential vendors for the new web services,” fish says. “Support only finds out about the requirements when they are directed to create the holes.”

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This pilot fish supervises the IT help desk, so he’s on the scene when one of his support techs takes a call that’s very ordinary — mostly.

“It was some normal problem like ‘install this printer’ or ‘the computer forgot my password, please reset it,'” says fish.

“But at the end of the call, when they were discussing various things, the user happened to mention, very proudly, that she always turns off her computer at the end of the day every Friday, so it can get its updates over the weekend.

“The tech didn’t have the heart to break the bad news to her. He just told her that was a good idea and to have a nice day.”

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