The second part I'm unclear about is how you could pass SOC2 when you aren't terminating account access simultaneously with the employment termination.
> On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.
For god's sake, don't commit crimes while you're committing crimes.
This article is hilarious. The two bickering brothers remind me of the guys in the Oceans movies played by Casey Affleck and Scott Caan. It’s amazing they got this close to sensitive data.
So many red flags, I can't even.
But how do you pick up the stuff from your desk? I once lost a nice pair of headphones this way.
Still a net positive in my experience.
Ever tried to login with two factor and justify a maxed out company card while high as a kite and drunk?
It’s stressful.
I know of one case where this was totaly unintentional, and a machinest at a local pulp and paper plant had self delegated to write the software that controlled tension on the giant machines in the mill, but as it was his only real forey into sofware, nobody else could operate it, and they fired him after a manegment reshuffle, and then after the next scheduled shut down, nothing worked right, greasy dusty ancient screen with a blinking cursor was what they had, plugged into the important bits of a half sqare mile plant. still funny to think about!
What you really need is one that chirps once every (multiple of) 20-28 hours (with weighting towards 23-25 to keep it roughly around the time you set it going and an infrequent skipping of a day.) Also with different volumes and, ideally, different chirps. Occasionally a double chirp just for extra insanity causing.
(A Michael Jackson "hee heee" would be another good option.)
WTF?
Hilarious in the context of this administration.
In fact I’d guess they’re not, since they’ve been employed on government projects since a young age.
> When the company discovered Sohaib Akhter’s felony conviction, it terminated both brothers’ employment during an online remote meeting on Feb. 18, 2025
from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-jury-convicts-virgina... which is a better source on this.
That prompts the question of why background checks are so lax that they were hired before this was discovered.
It should be a federal crime with prison time to make a DB for a federal agency and not hash and salt passwords or other auth credentials.
When I advised them that it was a bad idea to store password in clear, they answered that they keep it in clear so that they can send it when someone forget.
Defeated by such argument, I deleted my account.
Something bad did end up happening due to that lax security and there were oh so many meetings about it.
This is the sort of thing that makes me want to check out of the whole circus. Here I am, telling you ahead of time, and you ignored me
So how there's a circus that we could have avoided and not only do I get zero recognition for identifying the threat ahead of time, the people who ignored me keep their jobs and turn it into a zoo where everyone is scrambling in endless meetings
And I've seen it play out a few times. After a point, why bother...
Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked."
Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as abrupt as possible including terminating all access immediately, (b) never give second chances to anyone with any sort of criminal record (even say decades old marijuana posession or something).
I'd prefer a more balanced version: limit unilateral access to sensitive systems in general (not just of recently-fired employees), when someone is fired immediately shut off particularly sensitive credentials if they do exist (but not their general-purpose login/email account), avoid hiring people convicted of wire fraud as sysadmins, hash your @!#$ing passwords, etc.
You're proving my point—employers take the most extreme lesson and it's considered expected practice. They absolutely should have immediately terminated the credentials that granted unilateral access to sensitive databases. (Ideally those would never exist in the first place—there are two-person schemes. A pair of bad actors...well apparently happens according to this article...but is far more unusual.) But employers regularly (but shouldn't) terminate all access including credentials that allow last email to colleagues exchanging personal contact info or something.
The employee is always the last to know. This is standard fare.