Failing to disable a former employee’s account was a huge mistake
PWNED Welcome once again to PWNED, the column where security flubs are held up to the harsh, piercing red light of the vulture signal. This week’s sad story concerns a municipality that failed to perform basic account housekeeping and paid for it dearly.Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale of tech missteps comes courtesy of Nicole Beckwith, who serves as the senior director for security engineering and operations at Cribl, an AI platform for telemetry. She used to work as a consultant, and at one point was hired to investigate breaches in an American city’s network.
A threat actor took a “leisurely tour” of the city’s online resources and had started messing around with conference room projectors and other relatively harmless endpoints. Then they realized that they could change settings with the water utility where they switched many controls off, potentially endangering the water supply.
When Beckwith investigated, she found that all of the mischief was performed by an account that belonged to “Greg from Auditing.” There was just one problem. Greg hadn’t worked for the city for many years. Unfortunately, even though Greg was no longer around, his account was, and it retained extensive privileges, including domain admin rights, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) operator access, and even the ability to perform help desk functions. It’s unclear if someone from auditing ever needed this level of access, but a former employee definitely did not.
