Comment Re:Proof (Score 4, Insightful) 546
So the NSA keeps a list of identities of MI6 members stored where some Hawaii-based contracted sysadmin has complete access to them.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit if the did. As a system admin for over 20 years you would be surprised what you come across, what people trust you with and to do.
One bank I worked for all the terminals where secure with individual passwords, everything was secure. All but the backups. Everything was backup to tape that everyone in the IT department had access too. The backup tapes where not secure or tracked. Anyone with a IT badge could have walked in there, walked out with every customer record and it would have been weeks before it was noticed.
I was system admit at a real estate company. For years my job was to load weekly backups to a offsite location in the trunk of my car. This data contained every piece of data the company had from pay role to customer information.
One time when I was cleaning out an account for a former employee, on his unsecured home directory I came across a CSV file containing a dump of every customers account number, name, DOB, address, credit card numbers, SSN, and a lot more. If I wanted to commit a case of identity theft I could have made off like a bandit and nobody would have ever known.
Email admin. Almost every thing that goes on in a company now goes through the email system. A email admin could know more about the company than any one if he wanted too. What big deals are going down to who is sleeping with who in the office.
What it comes down to is people simply think that computers are all secure because they have no real clue how they work. The secretary at the front desk, she has no clue that her gossip is stored in plan text on a server that anyone in the IT department can read. Most CEO, CFO, BLTs, are the same way. They will email back and forth about the upcoming "big deal" they are working on.
Most people are simply ignorant on how computers really work.