A case study in why credentials are revoked before firings.
He later asked, “How do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012?” I actually winced when I read this bit.
Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, now both 34, had been in trouble before. Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.
After their stints in jail, the brothers worked their way back into the tech world. In 2023, Muneeb got a job with a Washington, DC, firm that sold software and services to 45 federal clients; Sohaib got a job at the same company a year later.
Meanwhile I can’t get an interview for jobs paying less than my current salary. What’s their secret?
Update: The company that employed the brothers went unnamed in court documents but was identified in the press as Opexus. An eagle-eyed Ars reader points out that, back in December, the company gave a series of quotes to Cyberscoop about the entire incident. Though Opexus did background checks, the company admitted that “additional diligence should have been applied,” it acknowledged that “the terminations were not handled in an appropriate manner,” and it said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Clearly, the failure here was all-encompassing.
the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.”
But the problem was not the hiring but the firing process.
I remember working at a TV station where I got caught in a round of layoffs. Most of us they told in advance, that our last day would be in six weeks, but they laid off an engineer at a smaller station and had him gone immediately. They also deleted his account that day, and that’s when they discovered he was running a lot of station processes through his own account. I think it took the corporate engineers a week to get everything back to a fully operational state.
Yeah, so many git credentials are tied to the account that created them.
I do something like this at my workplace. I guess it gives me leverage, but the main reason is that my boss drags his heels so much when I try to improve the workflow that it’s easier for me to just crack on without his knowledge.
Apparently this is common enough that there is a term for it.
I think the latter was the main reason. It sounded like his boss really had no idea what was going on or how to make things work. It was only the two of them at that station and they laid off the guy who was actually doing everything.
That was a wild read. Glad they got caught, who knows what scheme they had for the guns.
Good reason to have an AI agent ready to go actually.
So they could delete the backups as well? Great idea!
We’ve definitely never seen that backfire at all in recent history…
