This incident happened 10 years ago. After a serious injury to the back, I went to work under an employment contract in a state organization for the position of an IT specialist. The money was paid ridiculously, but captivated by a clear list of duties and the ability to implement all my ideas without paranoid and contradictory information security instructions (at least I thought so when arranging for this job).



The problem of most state organizations is a very scarce IT budget, with amazingly grand tasks and plans. It is necessary to turn around and heal in all ways in the implementation of all the "hotels" of the management. Employees, who are eventually loaded with more and more work in the implementation of these grand plans, begin to conflict with IT specialists and often organize a serious sabotage of innovations.



At work, it was discovered that five employees did not have personal computers. More precisely, they were in the form of obsolete or unworking system blocks. The server was overloaded and needed to unload it as much as possible to spread non-profile tasks on other machines. The task was not trivial, but unexpectedly we were brought a sensory information board stand in anti-vandal performance. The tablo was proudly called “Information Kiosk”. The heart of this kiosk was a very good motherboard with the ability to organize a RAID-massive of 6 SATA disks and a rather very shaky processor. The special software kiosk worked only on Win-XP. Since the computing power of the kiosk most of the time stagnated, in the conditions of a shortage of free computers, I was decided to use them to the maximum for my work (and it was possible to run the miner). It was added two hard drives of 160 GB. The information kiosk has taken over the function of the main antivirus server as well as a network resource for the temporary storage of automatic backup of user data.



Night backup data scripts used the kiosk capabilities to the maximum. Since in HR the number of simultaneous access to the network resource is limited to 10 sessions, night backup had to be carried out in stages. Every hour, dozens of computers were "awakened", files and databases were archived, which were copied over the network to the disks of the kiosk. In the morning, the results of the night copying were transferred to the removable disk, which was carefully hidden in a iron box called a safe.



Two weeks later, periodically unexplained failures began to occur in my network – some backups, or even all stopped being copied to the disks of the kiosk and had to be taken over the network manually from users’ computers. I could not find an explanation for this problem. The test launches worked very well. You come in the morning - the kiosk is working, available on the network, not hanging, but the logs indicate the reason for the failure - the unavailability of the network resource. Initially, I was guilty of hanging an eight-port switch (switch), through which the kiosk was connected to the internal network. I had to put a whole cable from the server to the information kiosk and the problem disappeared for a while. Ten days later, she made herself known again. But now it was visible that the kiosk itself restarted at night due to a power outage. Well, that’s the problem for the “charming lunches.” I managed to lock the 1000th uninterruptor into the body of the kiosk and the normal backup operation was restored. I rejoiced – I achieved my own and solved all the problems that arose.



But two days later I was, gently speaking, disappointed. One of the guards complained to me. I prevented him from sleeping at night. This guard was a former officer and was well acquainted with computer networks and computers. It turned out that the night active operation of the kiosk caused the transition of its fans to enhanced mode of operation. The noise prevented him from sleeping.



First, he calmed the fans of the kiosk by disconnecting the eight-port switch, and then found an automaton in the electric shield that cut off the 220V power at the kiosk. But the interruptor I put inside the anti-vandal body caused him a feeling of tremendous indignation. As soon as he cut out the machine in the shield, the noise of the fans was added to a loud and boring scream of the interruptor that immediately appeared and finally deprived him of his night's sleep at the "fighting post".



The management ordered me to improve the ventilation in the anti-vandal body of the kiosk so that the mental balance of the guard post would not be disturbed at night.



This case was one of those that forced me to rethink my approach to the principles and rules of information security.