I’m sure you’ve been following the Terry Childs case. Mr. Childs was a sysadmin in San Francisco who decided to change a few passwords and thus locked the city out of their new wide area network. Though it is still not clear why Mr. Childs did this, he had been recently written up for poor job performance.
Among others, Matt Pollicove wrote about this and the need for trust. Matt asserts that trust is a must and I completely agree. That being said, the last two points in his post are mistaken.
First he says:
This means, making sure there’s no orphan or rogue accounts in the systems.
While this is a generally accepted good practice, it would not have necessarily helped San Francisco keep from losing their network. Privileged account management would have been far more useful. Discipline and control around how sysadmins gain access to and use root-like accounts, the bread and butter of privileged account management, would have helped avert some of San Francisco’s problems.
Second Matt says:
GRC tools will be a must in this verification.
what others say