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  1. #11
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    A walk back in time when cloud computing was optional for business success.
    How things have changed...

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    A unlikely but possible situation has arisen. The superadmin at a company has been given marching orders. All the passwords of other users have been changed, so nobody can log in.
    The service provider does backups, so there is no help there.

    Its not often that a superadmin will be forced to leave, but....

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    Quote Originally Posted by Andromeda View Post
    A unlikely but possible situation has arisen. The superadmin at a company has been given marching orders. All the passwords of other users have been changed, so nobody can log in.
    The service provider does backups, so there is no help there.

    Its not often that a superadmin will be forced to leave, but....
    My brother had to do an audit on a company a couple of years back. When he got there the one partner had made off with the server and all the backups. The partner's car had an "unfortunate break in" and of course everything was stolen...

    My brother also tells of an IT manager in one company funneling vast amounts of money through various accounts in the systems that he was supposed to look after.

    Who looks after the the ones "who hold all the keys"

    One of the companies that I do work for got a virus all over their network earlier this year. Besides losing all the servers they also lost the workstations. NOBODY BACKS THE WORKSTATIONS UP. I ended up having to give the engineers my 10 years of data of the work that I did for them. The data was supposedly on a couple of the workstations that got trashed.

    Companies are far too complacent about IT security / backups / giving a handful of people too much power. What do you do - I don't know - systems are just so complex today.

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    What people fail to understand is the pure legality of situations like this.

    See if a super Admin is given the marching orders and they lock the company out then that Admin can face serious consequences.

    But i have seen many a policy and it is always scary to see that only one or two people hold the ability to change passwords, have "main access". Any company knows that user accounts must be managed properly and this always mean that the owner MUST have permissions on their own account to even lock out/change any other account including the "supper user" This use to be a simple implementation. But thanks to could computing and other services some functionality is obscure or depending on the platform none existent.

    User priority is the downfall of many many businesses. Yet there are so many tools to prevent this situation but for some reason it is almost always overlooked.

    as but one example this was a little while ago: Manage and monitor priority accounts This is for Microsoft 365 but point is a lot of people do use this and i do mean a lot. It is worth the read and well worth considering if this falls within your needs.

    But in all i am just thankful it is not my problem anymore. Google docs actually is really simple easy tool "depending on what it is you wish to do" and for the most part it is really handy for me to use because a TON of infrastructure is just implemented out of the gate. For me personally it works but i know there are many many complaints but i feel not all of them justified. i personally like it and will continue to use it as long as it is free :P

    anyhow best of luck. But if you are an business owner and you have to phone IT to get access to files you need to take a serious look. Make sure your account can access everything. Now that is a broad term for policies but make sure your account policies is at the point that it is equal or greater then that of head admin. Always make sure that no one has the right to change your permissions/passwords. Yes you can reserve an account that can BUT that account should be under your control only. This is to allow you to change things without compromising priority.

    i am so thankful this isn't my day job anymore...
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    Disclaimer: everything written by me can be considered as fictional.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tec0 View Post
    See if a super Admin is given the marching orders and they lock the company out then that Admin can face serious consequences.
    The reason they use an online service is simply because the many partners are all located in different cities. The Superadmin is a director. I am an admin and the other directors are normal users.

    This is a commercial global service provider but the client's situation is somewhat unique, in that they have no employees that are not directors. As with all enterprises, directors are allocated certain tasks, in line with their strengths, and his was simply to setup the service and system.

    I get what you mean though and many years of audit agrees with you. But sometimes clients have a different view and goals that don't even come near my compliance concerns. Many smaller businesses still see the accounting function as a necessary evil and nothing more. Until.......

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    Quote Originally Posted by Andromeda View Post
    The reason they use an online service is simply because the many partners are all located in different cities. The Superadmin is a director. I am an admin and the other directors are normal users.

    This is a commercial global service provider but the client's situation is somewhat unique, in that they have no employees that are not directors. As with all enterprises, directors are allocated certain tasks, in line with their strengths, and his was simply to setup the service and system.

    I get what you mean though and many years of audit agrees with you. But sometimes clients have a different view and goals that don't even come near my compliance concerns. Many smaller businesses still see the accounting function as a necessary evil and nothing more. Until.......
    Honestly you are right, and yes some companies clients have such a heavy reliance on "online" services that they cannot have it any other way. The only suggestion if at all possible is to create a "Owner role" give it supremacy when it comes to account management only? This would be a stupid role because if anyone gets access to it they can just create a user account and abuse that. So there will always be risk. Hence the owner account must only be known by 1 or 2 individuals at most.

    I normally structure it like this Owner > Supper user, user and so on. Making it that The Owner account cannot be deleted "if possible by the Supper user. Again it comes down to platform, infrastructure and what is possible. Makes one wish for just active directory right? Active directory when it works it works well and i love it. My current office is basically a second hand server with a view VMs running what i needs "file sharing, VN and VPN for remote login. I found Microsoft "as much as i HATE to say it" useful Functional. i can control any device on my network remotely and because everything is VM and hosted locally i can still do a lot of "magic".

    But i am looking into renting a server with KVM and want to rock Ubuntu on it. The idea is to run a few scripts on it to see what is possible. The idea is to have a script pushing data to a google drive account upon log out. Then a second script will delete all the data on the server at specified time. The idea is IF i lose access to the server there will be nothing on it, if it gets compromised there is literally only an install. As you know yourself Linux can delete Neo from the Matrix if bothered to do so, so it is a safe way to push data in and out using 2 cloud services. This will allow me to do 3 things. 1 work from any device that can host a browser. 2 have a larger system for compute and 3 still have access to my data if i lose access to the server. But for now i am happy hosting everything locally. It is just i plan to travel next year and i want to be able to work from any place. But at this point i digress i think i am drifting of topic
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    Hi, Guys just to drop something in here, this a people problem. I work with a lot of businesses most of whom don't use cloud computing. I've seen it all, from a guy who was put in charge take a lot of product uploads, getting hold of clients and making them pay into his bank account to chaps who created websites for a business that have scripts redirecting clients to pay the employee. Ive seen original devs or ex IP guys comeback and leave doors back into the system and wreak havoc.
    From a psychological point what I've noticed is as soon as people see big money moving through these systems that's where the ideas and temptation start. It always amazed me however that many of these people seem completely incompetent when it comes to their jobs, but when they need to find a way to hijack sales they are extremely resourceful.
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    Quote Originally Posted by New Perspective studio View Post
    Hi, Guys just to drop something in here, this a people problem. I work with a lot of businesses most of whom don't use cloud computing. I've seen it all, from a guy who was put in charge take a lot of product uploads, getting hold of clients and making them pay into his bank account to chaps who created websites for a business that have scripts redirecting clients to pay the employee. Ive seen original devs or ex IP guys comeback and leave doors back into the system and wreak havoc.
    From a psychological point what I've noticed is as soon as people see big money moving through these systems that's where the ideas and temptation start. It always amazed me however that many of these people seem completely incompetent when it comes to their jobs, but when they need to find a way to hijack sales they are extremely resourceful.
    You must PLEASE tell us more about these sorts of incidents - I bet you have lots of interesting stories. I will start a thread called "The Fraud Files" where these stories can be told.

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    Quote Originally Posted by adrianh View Post
    You must PLEASE tell us more about these sorts of incidents - I bet you have lots of interesting stories. I will start a thread called "The Fraud Files" where these stories can be told.
    Oh? Go ahead.
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