this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
15 points (94.1% liked)

Cybersecurity

9189 readers
76 users here now

c/cybersecurity is a community centered on the cybersecurity and information security profession. You can come here to discuss news, post something interesting, or just chat with others.

THE RULES

Instance Rules

Community Rules

If you ask someone to hack your "friends" socials you're just going to get banned so don't do that.

Learn about hacking

Hack the Box

Try Hack Me

Pico Capture the flag

Other security-related communities !databreaches@lemmy.zip !netsec@lemmy.world !securitynews@infosec.pub !cybersecurity@infosec.pub !pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub

Notable mention to !cybersecuritymemes@lemmy.world

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

quick case study for the cybersec folks here. got this real story in my dpo class & wanted ur thoughts.

IT guy at a bank, last day of his notice period. a trainee saw him puttin some CD-ROMs in his bag & told security. they checked him at the exit and found a full export of the bank's top clients on the discs. guy got fired for gross misconduct & a police complaint was filed.

any red flags or stuff that stands out to u technicaly or otherwise ? i have my own ideas on this cas but curious what u guys think first?

thx ๐Ÿ˜Ž

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Birdwants@lemmus.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

hey! thx for the reply. your points hit exactly on what i've been obsessed with lol.

"Why is the IT guy trusted...?" & "Why does he have access...?" totally agree, huge mistakes. but what if they actually didn't trust him? maybe they cut his privs to the bare minimum but since he knows the system, he found a loophole to bypass the DLP. in my class, everyone laughed bc CD-ROMs are "obsolete tech"... so did the sec team underestimate this attack surface? maybe they blocked USB ports & set alarms for external drives but forgot the optical burner? or maybe it was just easier to bypass optical media rules without triggering anything.

"Is access to the database monitored?" maybe he knew the exact threshold before a system alarm goes off? that would explain why he only picked "top" clients instead of the whole DB. plus, fitting a full banking DB on a few CDs is technicaly impossible anyway, so he had to cherry-pick.

my intuition is also on the trainee reporting it. why him/her? that's a break in the incident reporting process. where were the managers? the fact that it's neither a colleague nor a manager makes me wonder if it was a single-man job. any accomplices? i've seen enough teams to know that when ppl feel frustrated or abused, they tend to turn others against the board. keeping someone on notice after firing them is a massive danger for this exact reason.

what do u think?

--