Executives: "We deserve to be paid thousands times more than the average employee because we're responsible for the whole company!"
Bad thing happens
Executives: "It was the intern's fault."
The story I forever remember when I read about IT shit is the story told to me by an old buddy of mine who worked IT for a big hospital. They got called up by a doctor who was complaining that their desktop was "locked." After several minutes over the phone, several reboots, they hopped in the elevator and went to their office and it turned out the doctor wasn't double-clicking.
My [redacted] is an engineer and he tells me all the time about how dumb his fellows are when it comes to anything that isn't engineering.
My [redacted] works in microchip manufacturing, and one of the engineers they work with was unironically talking about microchips in the COVID vaccine.
They makin' biomicrochips in they vaccines to tell our cells what to do!
lol one of the computers at my job has the username/password set as user/user
When I was in the military all of our equipment used the manufacturer's default /shrug
I did work experience in a government building, there was only one code for all the lockers per floor and due to a combination of the IT department being so underfunded and so many people not understanding how to change their passwords, loads of the computers had the same password I probably shouldn't say what the password was for legal reasons or something but it was really basic, as in as simple as they could possibly make it to tick all the boxes for minimum amount of complexity.
To anyone who knows anything about this sort of thing the excuse of "an intern did it" is a total joke, for the reasons you stated. If an intern's mistake can cause this kind of damage then you fucked up on so many levels beforehand. Unfortunately SolarWinds is already a government approved vendor so the people involved will continue to fail upwards.
Changing passwords periodically is not worthwhile, even Microsoft admits it.
'at least 1,000 engineers'
It was an autistic eleven year old sitting in their bedroom wasn't it?
