Conducting Black Operations


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Conducting Black Operations in the Corporate IT Theatre

Full Description

There are times when you can live with the petty and small-minded rules that have been made to "make life easier". The IT policy that allows people to literally defecate over their PCs because you keep backups. They stick in the craw, but you can live with them, because you know that the backups can fail sometimes. You can almost predict the times it's going to happen.

Funny that.

Anyway, sometimes you've tried to follow the rules. You've made every attempt to maintain the status quo and fight the rising tides of ineptitude and malicious intent. But enough's enough.

Now it's time for action. Whether it be reactive, or proactive you are authorised to conduct black operations against the enemy. The silent removal of porn and mp3s from the home directories of certain users during the night via self-deleting cronjobs (no console logs) is now allowed. The efficient injection of lines into /var/log/* stating that someone (against all of your warnings) logged in via telnet, had their password sniffed (you did advise the purchase of a Sunblade 1000 for firewall purposes) and the artful defacing of the website with rumours of insider trading and who's been doing what with the company credit card is just the first in a series of mysterious and unconnected incidents which you can be responsible for, should you bend your mind to it.

Black operations are not for the unskilled or the half-hearted. Great cunning is required as well as a plethora of tools ranging from the common screwdriver (how else do you loosen the cables to the server room UPS at the rival company when you're there for a "job interview") to the multi-purpose trojan Perl scripts which supposedly maintain the userbase and not actually audit /etc/passwd, run deCSS on the DVD in the Boss' PC and grep the mail spool for words supplied from an optional text file.

For while the rewards are great, getting caught is at best problematic. Your PFY will disavow any knowledge that you were ever in eyeshot at the time when the 'incidents' occured, as he settles into your chair. He will offer to the boss that he delete your account, empty your desk and change the root passwords rather than implicate himself and the IT section. You're on your own.

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