I stole 20 GB of data from Capgemini – and now I'm leaking it, says cybercrook A miscreant claims to have broken into Capgemini and leaked a large amount of sensitive data stolen from the technology services giant – including source code, credentials, and T-Mobile's virtual machine logs. The French multinational IT and consulting firm did not immediately respond to The Register's request for comment, and …
Yet another example of the root of the problem being completely missed yet again by greedy, profit-at-all-costs, management that ar eonly around for 2 years to collect their vested stock options and move on.
You hire a bunch people who have no investment in a company's interests, staff who simply see it as just another job in a long line of shorter term contracts for slightly better pay than the last job, couldn't really care less about customer data 'cos the cheaper staff get paid anyway no matter what happens, there you go. What irks me the most is the governemnt's short sightedness is that they hire these companies by the dozen at 2-3 times the cost of in-house staff, then complain about £20bn financial black-holes!
Getting into my 50s I'm starting to see the world for what it really is, a right pile of shite, full of greedy, selfish morons with zero idea how to do anything properly without effing up eveyrthing they touch!
You do Cagemini an injustice. The upper management have been there for years, milking the workers for all their hard work, while busy thinking up excuses as to why they won't be raising pay for the 10th year running. Not even to be in line with inflation, I am talking zero raises, while they congraulate themselves with bonus after bonus.
That’s the management consultancy mindset: Capgemini in taking over Ernst & Young were probably a bit naive about what they had taken on. As the former E&Y employees wormed their way into the day-to-day operation of Capgemini, so the rot began and spread.
The sad part, was the ex E&Y technical consultants/staff did have good skills, just a huge inferiority complex created by the management consultants who thought so highly about themselves…
AC because I was there and saw and experienced it first hand…
It's not short-sightedness. Contracting out essential functions to private companies at exorbitant rates then saying there's no money left for them to operate the other essential functions is the system working exactly as intended.
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have." - Barry Goldwater
... And a network that is powerful enough to give you access to all your data can be used to transfer all your data elsewhere (this is just a warning!).
True. Get shit on all the time despite doing a good job. Yet I watch the grifters get promoted and paid a lot more yet know fuck all. Much like council tax, we both pay but know several people on the street that still claim single person tax despite living with their partners. How they've never been caught for that fraud is anyone's guess.
"Getting into my 50s I'm starting to see the world for what it really is, a right pile of shite, full of greedy, selfish morons with zero idea how to do anything properly without effing up eveyrthing they touch!"
There's no ownership of responsibility. Senior executives are insulated from prosecution so why should they care if they mishandle personal data? If those execs could wind up with fines, jail and a lifetime ban on working in that industry, maybe there would be more care.
I had to sign up to reply to you, ex Capgemini employee here (I lasted 2 years before becoming overwhelmed with what i saw).
Working at Cap changed my whole outlook on the affect of consultancy in public services, exactly as you put it there was no focus on quality products or best for customer just on showing delivery.
The quality of coding I saw there in the teams I came into contact with blew my mind, the focus is not making efficient systems for the customer, moreso lots of manual fixes and manual processes all so they can cross sell their managed service teams to support the mess they build.
I would absolutely love to see government allow local councils for example to employ their own development teams, paid properly and keep the knowledge in house. Instead as you say we make the argument that paying £800 a day for a graduate or even school leaver apprentice (charged less) is good value for money.
This is actually engineered, and has been since the Thatcher/Regan era where the movement began to shift to consultancies. You can even look at the IMF as a prime example where any money lending is conditional on opening up your public services to consultancies.
Not surprised this happend at Capgemini, on my first days I was told to write my password down instead of using a password manager. Go figure
One of the problems with having what is effectively infinite storage space is that there's a tendency to store an infinite amount of junk in it, "just in case". (American readers will know all about the 'garage auto-fill' effect, the way that our generous sized suburban garages rapidly -- and automatically - fill with useful junk so that never actually park cars in them.) Storage is the same; based in personal experience the amount of junk accumulating on drives, both personal and work, 'just in case' is incredible, especially as its easier, quicker and cheaper to buy more storage space than to spend a lot of time combing through existing storage to find and delete junk ("But is it really junk?"). So I'd guess that exfilating 20GByte of random data is going to include valuable data somewhere but without the knowledge of what data's actually relevant and up to date its likely to be useless. This might explain the slow leak -- its a desperate attempt to figure out whether the material is truly valuable.
Incidentally, 20GByte sounds like a lot of data but it is not, its what could be downloaded over USB onto a budget phone in a credible amount of time.
Another thought. I'm sure I'm not alone in having random software projects dumped on me because the people responsible have long left the company etc. To the uninitiated it sounds like I've been given the Keys To The Kingdom but anyone who's been there knows different, at best its going to be a hard slog to figure it out, at worst its just going to be unredeemable pile of junk.
"its easier, quicker and cheaper to buy more storage space than to spend a lot of time combing through existing storage to find and delete junk"
This. It's a lot less trouble to buy a new harddisc than to tidy up the crap that accumulates on the current one(s). Besides, that random kitten meme that I downloaded at half three in the morning three years ago...might be quite the thing that I need at some random point in the future.
"Incidentally, 20GByte sounds like a lot of data but it is not, its what could be downloaded over USB onto a budget phone in a credible amount of time."
Over WiFi on fibre, that'll take something like 5-6 minutes.
"at best its going to be a hard slog to figure it out, at worst its just going to be unredeemable pile of junk."
Upvote for this. Been there, sunk many teas, and in a couple of cases decided the best approach was to simply start again.
Actually, starting from scratch may in fact be the best approach, but that realisation doesn't tend to come after a lot of time and effort with the unredeemable junk, by which point you're not inclined to want to throw away all that work...
"This. It's a lot less trouble to buy a new harddisc than to tidy up the crap that accumulates on the current one(s). Besides, that random kitten meme that I downloaded at half three in the morning three years ago...might be quite the thing that I need at some random point in the future."
It's also easier to keep paying the monthly rent on a storage unit than clearing everything out and renting a truck to pick up what's to be kept. Been there. If I ever get a storage unit again, it will have a defined term and will be a stepping stone to moving house.
Luckily I have enough outbuildings that I can put stuff in a box, put the box into a big bin bag, slap a sticky label on it, and put it "over there somewhere".
God help me if I ever have to move, but it's not something that's even envisaged as a possible maybe. I like it too much here in the back of beyond.
> Incidentally, 20GByte sounds like a lot of data but it is not
This is one aspect that I find interesting, as the article states:
” "They had more data but I decided to exfiltrate only big files, company confidential, Terraform, and many more," the thief wrote.”
Given the size of other data breeches, I would expect that 20GB to be 200GB or more, or is the Terraform data, keys to much larger repositories yet to be mined.
"One of the problems with having what is effectively infinite storage space is that there's a tendency to store an infinite amount of junk in it, "just in case"."
There's also no downside in warehousing personal data and huge upsides to being able to sell it for nearly costless revenue.
At a job I'm at, some years ago our revs and bens database was deleted by the Indian support centre. For some reason someone cocked up and left the support account enabled and it oddly had access to the backups. So he connected in at night, deleted the main database and the backup. Apparently was caught at the airport, assume visiting relatives in the UK. Also assume he did it to other companies for them to get him so quick, unless the last part of the story was bullshit.
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