What to do with persistant offending user?

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Offer him a job. Seriously though, it narks me that people like this, regardless of seniority, are offered employment, and then, AMAZINGLY, seem to retain that employment, when there are those of us who are desparate to get in to decent positions.

 

meh, Kensington lock the case, password the bios, then let him try and justify removing the phat padlock to increase company profitability!

 

I would probably take screen shots of his PC to use as evidence. With the company I work for we have found straight/gay porn, illegal downloads, unofficial software, mp3's etc. Personally I want to string them up as it causes problems and potential viruses etc.

 

every organisation has people like this - the worst culprit in my last job was the IT director (Global) himself!

We use this http://www.websense.com/global/en/ProductsServices/WebsenseEnterprise/ nobody goes anywhere without us knowing about it - failing that explicitly block the guy at the firewall - failing that document everything, highlight to management the security risk and from then on its up to them, if they ignore it and he trashes the network simply pull out your saved email and say "I told you", if they listen and allow you to sort it then good. Bear in mind that there are some battles you just can't win!

 

One of our products at work that we also sell, and also have installed across the network is NetIntelligence.

You can't even fart on our network without the NI guys analyzing what you had for dinner last night, and already more than a few employees have been disciplined or removed as a result of net misuse. I personally have no probs with this, as I respect that I am on a company PC in company time, so would act accordingly anyway.

Big Brother ...

 

That's a pretty neat piece of software there Gav. Is it affordable?

 

Actually, yes, Pete - amazingly. It's effectively sold on a per-seat licence, so you scale it to your needs, and the remote installation and config of it is amazing. I'm desperately leaning on the head of NI (and my smoking buddy) to "lose" a copy my way - as yet to no avail !!

 

Seems to have cracked the reboot though!

 

personally, i'd remove his laptop and his password. if he cant obey the computer use policy, he doesnt get to use a computer. alternatively, give him windows 3.1. id like to see him getting those programs to run on that beast.

Senior execs annoy me with the whole, 'im above the rules' attitude. as far as im concerned, its one rule for all. end of story.

 

An update on this situation:

The matter was escalated as high up as it can go and the user 'spoken to' at very top level and agreed to tow the line.

I had his laptop back to re-image again and was instructed not to change any BIOS settings or passwords as it shouldn't be necessarry.

I gave it back all imaged and set up on Monday evening.

Tuesday afternoon at about 5:25 5 mins before going home time he calls complaining that his network transfer speed is 'unacceptably slow'

I checked a few settings, provider order, NIC port speed/duplex settings etc, change the provider order- reboot machine will not bring up the password prompt after the ctrl+alt+delete splash screen...

So I restart it and hit F8 to go to safe mode. When I enter the local admin password guess what- (family fortunes wrong question noise).

So I said to him, 'oh look it's not accepting the local administrator password I know it should be....'

He then advised me to try the password 'spongebob' which is not the local admin password we have documented for that laptop...

So with that I go in and disable a couple of services and look at the event log to try and fix the problem..

After basically having to admit that he's hacked his local account again after being quite sternly spoken to or 'bitchslapped' as my line manager likes to describe it he begs me not to tell the powers that be about it and starts telling me things like he only wanted to be able to change his desktop wallpaper yadda yadda yadda.

So the upshot was that after an hour of trying to get the thing to get to a password prompt I turned around and told him I'd have to reimage it again tomorrow and that it was time for me to go home.

A couple of days later we still had his machine because of a deluge of actually scheduled in work for people with genuine problems who I wasn't prepared to push aside for mr big cheese who's broken his machine again playing cat and mouse with the IT department.

He sent his secretary down physically to inquire what the hold up is and to remind us how important this guy is etc etc. To this I stated in no uncertain terms that hte machine shouldn't be back with us and that we have 'proper' work to do and are not prepared to drop our proper work because this guy insists on placing himself above the rules and has done it again.

I made it a point to say it loud enough for the powers that be to hear and was soon asked about it.

faced with w tough decision I decided not to lie to my boss and cover up for this guy like he had asked me to do.

My boss asked me to put it all into an email to hi including the request to cover it all up. The email I drafted has now been forwarded by the top dog IT director in my office to head office with a request to have this issue dealt with 'once and for all'.

Ironically I do feel a bit bad for the guy, but I'm not at all happy about the position he tried to put me in.

 

Why should you feel bad? He put himself in this position.

 

Good luck Pete, I hope it all goes well when it all comes out etc..

 

That guys thats the bleeding piss, i take the piss ...i'd do anything to get myself admin right only if there are some loopholes within the system, but would never use pwd crackers or the other method the geezer used...

He is

 

It's a tough one.
It feels great to get justice on guys like this.
But it never feels good when you see them leaving the office in tears wondering how they're going to pay the mortgage next month.

 

:Total abuse of power, perhaps he was picked on in the playground, anyway looks like he just thought he was better than everyone else and behold ...wasn't. The way I see it to have to use window washer and to try other tricks to try and hide his tracks it wasn't just the MSN weather forcast or the latest U2 album he was downloading

 

hmm atleast you have the power to do something we just charge them... the company i support has a *few* goverment contracts to support pc's and laptops and very *virus problem* pc/laptop that comes in is 90% related to p0rn.. these are high ranking people working in ministries and i have to spend hours and tax-payers money cleaning them (im paying for them you know! -while they surf you know what!) my boss simply said we charge them and everyone leaves happy... no such thing as company policy here or restrictions on what you do with the internet!

 

Any updates on this ongoing password cracking IT soap opera? I *really* want to know, its very entertaining!

 

I work for a government/council company and we deal with a lot of things like this and until recently had no policy for such problems. Myself and the other two lads in my dept had enough of deleting pron and software such as torrent and limewire of the ‘power corridor’ laptops so we set up a non-conformance database and log everything.

We are not trying to spy on people as often thought by every other department in the company but simply recording what people are getting up to.

This was started because some finance personnel had a simple Tetris style game knocking about sent via e-mail and they are got seriously reprimanded for it and this annoyed me as the top brass have so much crap installed it makes me sick when ‘lower’ staff get in trouble for a simple game that they play on their dinner.

Of course this isn’t allowed but why one rule for some people and not others just because of their position?

Passed this onto our IT manager and a big culprit was the MD and he simply said “Well I can’t really say anything to him about it…”

Not fair but the way it goes.

We also use a product called Track-IT and we have set it to automatically run an audit the second they log onto the network so we are always up to date.